Journal of Modern Italian Studies

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In the shadow of Franz Boas: the Italian

Committee for the Study of Population Problems
and the physical assimilation of immigrants
(1938–1955)

Francesco Cassata

To cite this article: Francesco Cassata (2019) In the shadow of Franz Boas: the Italian Committee
for the Study of Population Problems and the physical assimilation of immigrants (1938–1955),
Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 24:1, 79-96, DOI: 10.1080/1354571X.2019.1550700

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2019.1550700

Published online: 07 Feb 2019.

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JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES
2019, VOL. 24, NO. 1, 79–96
https://doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2019.1550700

In the shadow of Franz Boas: the Italian Committee

for the Study of Population Problems and the
physical assimilation of immigrants (1938–1955)
Francesco Cassata
University of Genoa

ABSTRACT
Between 1938 and 1955, the Italian Committee for the Study of Population
Problems (C.I.S.P.), headed by the world-renowned statistician and demographer
Corrado Gini, organized a number of field expeditions in order to empirically
verify the influence of the environment on the bodily changes of immigrants
(Albanian and Ligurian ‘colonies’ in Italy, and Italians in the U.S.). Based on original
archival sources, this article analyses, first, how the C.I.S.P. organized the demo-
graphic, anthropological and medical investigations on the physical assimilation
of immigrants, by adopting a specific research model inaugurated in 1911 by
American anthropologist Franz Boas; secondly, it shows how C.I.S.P. research was
conceived, from the very beginning, as a fundamental contribution to the ela-
boration of an alternative, ‘Latin’ eugenic agenda as well as a form of critical
distancing from the launch of the ‘Race Manifesto’, in July 1938.
RIASSUNTO
Tra il 1938 e il 1955, il Comitato Italiano per lo Studio dei Problemi della
Popolazione (C.I.S.P.), guidato dallo statistico e demografo di fama internazionale
Corrado Gini, organizzò una serie di missioni sul campo con l’obiettivo di verifi-
care empiricamente le influenze dell’ambiente sui cambiamenti fisici degli immi-
grati (le ‘colonie etniche’ albanesi e liguri in Italia e gli immigrati italiani negli Stati
Uniti). Sulla base di fonti d’archivio inedite, l’articolo analizza, in primo luogo,
come il C.I.S.P. organizzò le indagini demografiche, antropologiche e mediche
sull’assimilazione fisica degli immigrati, adottando uno specifico modello di
ricerca introdotto nel 1911 dall’antropologo americano Franz Boas; in secondo
luogo, l’articolo mostra come queste ricerche fossero concepite, fin dall’inizio,
come un fondamentale contributo all’elaborazione di una forma alternativa,
‘Latina’, di eugenica e, nello stesso tempo, come una forma di distanziamento
critico rispetto al lancio del ‘Manifesto della razza’ del luglio 1938.

KEYWORDS Franz Boas; Corrado Gini; eugenics; racial science; Race Manifesto

PAROLE CHIAVE Franz Boas; Corrado Gini; eugenica; scienza della razza; Manifesto della Razza

1. Introduction
With the rise of mass migrations to the U.S. from Southern and Eastern
Europe after 1890, fears about ‘race suicide’ and the biological deterioration

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

80 F. CASSATA

of the American stock started spreading across the country. With a view to
collecting data concerning the physical characteristics of the new
Americans, the U.S. Congress Immigration Commission in 1908 asked
Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas – himself a Jewish scholar
immigrated to U.S. from Germany in 1887 (Barkan 1992, pp.76–81) – to
compare the measurements of recent immigrants and their children with
those of older established Americans. The goal of the study was to deter-
mine whether one could observe any assimilation of the immigrants as far
as the form of the body was concerned. Published in 1911, the results of
Boas’ study were out of tune with the rest of the Commission Report (Boas
1911). Far from legitimizing the political propaganda for immigration restric-
tions, Boas’ data undermined traditional and unquestioned beliefs of physi-
cal anthropology, such as the stability of physical characters across space
and time as well as the use of head shapes as criteria for the construction of
racial typologies. Boas examined the skull measurements of first-generation
Americans of Italian and Jewish descent, and compared their cephalic index
to that of the population in the country of origin. He concluded that the
differences between first- and second-generation Americans born of differ-
ent ethnicities was smaller than between the respective European popula-
tions (Barkan 1992, pp.83–84). As Tracy Teslow (2014) has pointed out, Boas
showed that ‘environment mattered, that physical forms could change, and
that no one really knew for sure what true ‘racial characters’ were’ (p.34).
Although the ground-breaking impact of Boas’s 1911 study has been
widely recognized by historiography (Jackson and Depew 2017), its reso-
nance on the other side of the Atlantic, and particularly in Italy, has not yet
been fully reconstructed.
With the aim to partially fill this gap, this article sheds light on the
investigations on the physical assimilation of immigrants carried out by
the Italian Committee for the Study of Population Problems (C.I.S.P.)1
between 1938 and 1955. Established in 1928, as the Italian constituent
member of the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of
Population Problems (I.U.S.I.P.P.), and headed by the world-renowned sta-
tistician and demographer Corrado Gini (1884–1965), the C.I.S.P. adopted
the 1911 Boasian research model in order to empirically verify the influence
of the environment on the bodily changes of immigrants (respectively,
Albanian and Ligurian ‘colonies’ in Italy, and Italians in U.S.).
The partial results of these investigations were published after the end of
World War II as papers delivered by Corrado Gini at several international
congresses of genetics (Gini 1949).2 This confirms, on the one hand, the
relevant continuity between pre-war eugenics and post-war human genet-
ics, but, on the other, it has contributed to hiding the specific genesis of C.I.
S.P. investigations. This article intends to relocate them in the original
 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 81

historical context, re-establishing their significance for the debates concern-

ing eugenics and racial science in the interwar period.
The most important C.I.S.P. expeditions on the physical assimilation of
immigrants were conducted between August 1938 and April 1940, starting
therefore just a couple of weeks after the publication of the so-called
‘Manifesto of the Racial Scientists’, or ‘Race Manifesto’.3 This timing is rather
significant for two different, but intertwined reasons.
The first problem concerns the relationship between science and politics
in Fascist Italy, and, more specifically, how racial science – a complex and
politically transversal field in the 1930s and 1940s – was affected by
Mussolini’s decision to root Fascist state racism on a biological, scientific
and purportedly neutral ground, with the initiative of the ‘Race Manifesto’.
In his multidimensional role of president of the Italian Society of Genetics
and Eugenics (S.I.G.E.), from 1924, president of the Italian National Institute of
Statistics (I.S.T.A.T.), from 1926 (until 1931), and president of C.I.S.P. from 1928,
Gini was certainly the key figure of Fascist statistics, eugenics and population
science. Yet, its adhesion to nationalism, initially, and to Fascism, afterwards,
was significantly grounded on a scientific, allegedly neutral basis, represented
by its so-called ‘cyclical theory of nations’. This sort of demographic grand
theory on the rise, ageing and fall of human civilizations, rested on the
hypothesis that social metabolism was influenced by the biological decline
of the reproductive power and by the regenerative effects of migrations and
race crossings. Elaborated between 1909 and 1912 (Gini 1909, 1912a, 1912b),
in the mid-1920s this neo-organismic vision progressively expounded into
a broader eugenic, demographic and sociological framework, which legiti-
mized not only Fascist authoritarianism, but also its colonial imperialism and
state racism. To give just an example concerning this last point, at the Norman
Wait Harris Lecture at the University of Chicago in 1929, Gini praised ‘the
centralizing policy’ of Italian Fascism as a way to pursue the biological
unification of the nation through the enhancement of the ‘isolating factors’
of the ‘group feeling’ (Gini 1930, 136). And a few years after the promulgation
of the Racial Laws, in a lecture given in September 1941 at the University of
Uppsala, Gini reaffirmed this same thesis of the ‘biological function of nation-
alism and racism’ (Gini 1943, 65).
In Gini’s view, therefore, Fascism was a corollary of the ‘cyclical theory’
and could be explained on neutral and apolitical bases. As Anna Treves
(2001) vividly put it, in her innovative study of Italian demography: ‘He was
a fascist, and a heartfelt fascist, inasmuch as he could see fascism as
“Ginian”’(p.228).
From this perspective, the C.I.S.P. expeditions on the physical assimilation
of immigrants were envisaged as a scientific, neutral, tool for investigating
the core issue of any racial theory and policy, that is the complex relation-
ship between nature and nurture. This article explores, therefore, the short
82 F. CASSATA

circuit which occurred, in 1938, between a political act based on

a purportedly scientific statement (the ‘Race Manifesto’), and a scientific,
international research (C.I.S.P. investigations), which moulded the liberal
Boasian agenda into an alternative model for Fascist racism.
The issue of the ‘neutrality’ of science is strictly connected with
the second main focus of this article, concerning the relationship between
the C.I.S.P.’s scientific agenda, the international eugenic network and the
introduction of the ‘Race Manifesto’ in Fascist Italy.
The C.I.S.P. scientific explorations were, in fact, part and parcel of the
process of differentiation which characterized the international field of
eugenics during the late 1920s and 1930s. Starting from 1929, Fascist
eugenics coalesced around Gini’s specific model of ‘regenerative’ eugenics
(eugenica rinnovatrice), which was explicitly at odds with the North
American and North European eugenic model: instead of a rigid hereditar-
ianism, it emphasized a complex interaction between environment and
heredity, combining elements of Mendelism with traditional neo-
Lamarckian notions of ‘induction’ and ‘diathesis’; instead of denouncing
the degenerative risks of miscegenation, it drew attention to the ‘regenera-
tive’ effects of race crossings; instead of supporting policies based on birth
control, premarital certification and sterilization, it invoked population
growth, social hygiene, and the improvement of environmental health.
In the first half of the 1930s, this scientific and political opposition led to
institutional breaks in the international arenas of eugenics and population
science, respectively. In 1931, S.I.G.E. withdrew from the International
Federation of Eugenic Organizations (I.F.E.O.), while promoting, a few years
later, in 1935, the constitution of an alternative model, the ‘Latin’
International Federation of Eugenic Societies. In parallel, in 1931, C.I.S.P.
withdrew from I.U.S.I.P.P. (Cassata 2011, pp.142–147; Ramsden 2002), while
being allowed by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in July 1935,4 to
establish an alternative ‘International Centre for Scientific Cooperation’,5
based on bilateral agreements between C.I.S.P. and other national ad-hoc
population committees (members or not of I.U.S.I.P.P.) on specific and
‘objective’6 research activities.7 Coordinated by C.I.S.P., this Centre had
scientific contacts with the national Committees of Spain, Portugal, Poland,
Turkey, Brazil, Mexico, India, and Japan.8
As a result, between 1931 and 1935, Fascist eugenica rinnovatrice, elabo-
rated by Gini and actively promoted in his role of head of S.I.G.E. and C.I.S.P.,
became officially ‘Latin’, in opposition to Anglo-American and German-
Scandinavian eugenic policies, accused of being obsessed by the defence
of biological elites and the elimination of defectives.
From this twofold perspective – the ‘neutrality’ of science in Fascist Italy
and the implementation of ‘Latin’ eugenics – the C.I.S.P. attempts to solve
the nature/nurture conundrum through the demographic, anthropological
 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 83

and medical investigation of the impact of environment over the morpho-

logical characteristics of immigrants, may illuminate the tensions and con-
tradictions which accompanied the 1937–1938 racial turn in Fascist Italy,
both on the national and on the international level: how did the publication
of the ‘Race Manifesto’ affect the distinctive scientific and political positions
which Fascist Italy had assumed, between 1931 and 1935, in the fields of
eugenics and racial science? And how, conversely, did scientific research
react vis-à-vis the Nordic-Aryan racism of the ‘Race Manifesto’?
In order to start answering these questions, this article will analyse,
first of all, how C.I.S.P. organized a full range of demographic, anthro-
pological and medical investigations on the physical assimilation of
immigrants, by adopting the research model inaugurated in 1911 by
American anthropologist Franz Boas; secondly, it will show how this
research was conceived, from the very beginning, as a fundamental con-
tribution to the elaboration of an alternative, ‘Latin’ eugenic model as
well as a form of critical distancing from the launch of the ‘Race
Manifesto’, in July 1938.
This monographic issue of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies is
dedicated to the seminal role of Michele Sarfatti in the historiography
of Fascist anti-Semitism in the last 30 years. One of the most valuable
contributions of Sarfatti’s research has been the constant effort to disen-
tangle the relationship between eugenics, scientific racism and anti-
Semitism in Fascist Italy, by precisely defining the characteristics and
boundaries of Fascist anti-Semitic policies as well as documenting the
ambiguous negotiation between science and politics, which marked the
fundamental turning point of July 1938 (Sarfatti 2016, pp.612–613). By
embracing this methodological legacy, this article intends not only to pay
tribute to Sarfatti’s suggestions but also to disclose innovative and pos-
sibly fertile lines of research.

2. C.I.S.P. research program on the physical assimilation of

immigrants
In August 1932, at the Third International Eugenics Congress, Charles
B. Davenport, head of the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor
and chairman of the I.F.E.O., celebrated in his presidential address the
increasing international spread of eugenics:

Sterilization as a useful aid in negative eugenics has been adopted by

Denmark . . . England and the Netherlands are considering legislation on
the subject. Sterilization is being at least widely discussed. The principle of
national determination of immigration has become recognized. . . .
Marriage advice stations have sprung up in Germany and Gosney and
84 F. CASSATA

Popenoe are responsible for an active center in Los Angeles. (Davenport

1934, p.18)

Corrado Gini, head of the Italian delegation, reacted immediately to

Davenport’s speech, by suggesting to the international audience gathered
in the New York American Museum of Natural History, to abandon the ‘old
program, limited to the negative purpose of eliminating beings inferior by
heredity’ (Gini 1934, p.27), while following the Italian way of ‘regenerative
eugenics’, inaugurated in 1929 by the S.I.G.E. Congress in Rome (Gini 1932).
In Gini’s words, ‘regenerative eugenics’ had:

. . . the special purpose of studying, through a series of successive generations,

how new stocks rise, what circumstances determine their formation in the
midst of the obscure mass of population . . . and what importance may be
ascribed in their formation to the influence of happy combinations arising
from cross-breeding and favored by natural selection, such as the change of
environment caused by emigration, or the selection of the original popula-
tions which occurs in migration. (Gini 1934, p.27)

Gini’s provocative motto – ‘Facts, facts, facts’ (28) – was soon translated into
a concrete and vast research program. Between 1933 and 1940, C.I.S.P.
organized eleven expeditions in order to empirically prove the principles
of ‘regenerative eugenics’. The first set of seven investigations was intended
to shed light on the ‘revival’ effect of racial crossing as well as on the
dysgenic effects of biological isolation, by focusing on ‘primitive popula-
tions’, that is populations allegedly considered in a state of demographic
isolation, such as the Dawada of Tripolitania, the Samaritans of Palestine,
Mexican communities, the Karaites of Poland and Lithuania, the Bantu of
South Africa and the Berbers from Giado. The second set included three
different expeditions which aimed to study the interplay between heredity
and environment through the analysis of the physical assimilation of immi-
grants (Gini and Federici 1943; Gini 1928).
While the first group has attracted so far a limited scholarly attention
(Cassata 2011; Berlivet 2016), C.I.S.P. investigations on the physical assimila-
tion of immigrants have remained almost completely neglected.
The first two scientific investigations dedicated to the issue of the phy-
sical assimilation of immigrants were carried out between August 1938 and
April 1940, and regarded foreign ‘ethnic islands’ (isole etniche) in Italy,
namely the Albanian colonies in Calabria (the Arbëreshë) and the Ligurian
(and Ligurian-Piedmontese) settlements in Sardinia (Federici 1942); the third
expedition, focused on Italian immigrants in the U.S., was conceived
between 1933 and 1936, but actually implemented in the mid-fifties. The
research models adopted were different: the first two expeditions in Calabria
and Sardinia were concerned with differences between migrants and their
descendants, through a comparison between the data collected in 1938–40
 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 85

and those of Ridolfo Livi’s military anthropometric survey, published

between 1896 and 1905, on the Italian recruits from the classes
1859–1863. The third investigation was based on the comparison between
Italian emigrants to the U.S. and those who had remained behind, the so-
called sedentes.
In addition to Boas, explicit reference points for C.I.S.P. investigations on
the physical assimilation of immigrants was the research conducted in
the second half of the 1930s by German secondary school teacher Walter
Dornfeldt Dornfeldt and by American anthropologist of Jewish origins Harry
L. Shapiro, respectively on Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe to Berlin
(Dornfeldt 1941) and on Japanese immigrants to Hawaii (Shapiro 1939).
Published when the elimination of European Jews was gaining steam,
Dornfeldt’s study was a doctoral dissertation, conducted in the early 1930s
at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in Berlin, under the super-
vision of Eugen Fisher and Wolfgang Abel, and successfully defended in
December 1939. Between 1932 and 1934, Dornfeldt had taken the head
measurements of 2,252 Jews, to calculate their changes over time. His
conclusions partially confirmed Boas’ emphasis on environmental factors,
without contradicting Nazi hereditarianism but also avoiding any explicit
expression of anti-Semitism (Steinweis 2006, pp.55–56).
Shapiro’s connection to the liberal Boasian research agenda was more
transparent. A C.I.S.P. foreign correspondent since 1932,9 Shapiro published
in 1935 The Heritage of the ‘Bounty’, a field study of Polynesian hybridity, in
which he highlighted the ‘hybrid vigor’ and normal intelligence of the
Pitcairners, strongly disassociating miscegenation from ‘degeneration’.
Back in New York from the Pacific and shocked at the racial policies of
Nazi Germany, he organized in 1935 the first American public condemnation
of scientific racism (Anderson 2012, p.251). In 1939 Shapiro was the author
of Migration and Environment, a vast examination of Japanese immigrants to
Hawaii, their children and their relatives in Japan, which was inspired by
Boas’ 1911 seminal study. Since the end of 1936 Gini had offered to publish
Shapiro’s research in the C.I.S.P. series,10 immediately capturing the analo-
gies between Shapiro’s Boasian racial science and the C.I.S.P. projects.11
Every C.I.S.P. expedition was characterized by a standardized collecting
procedure, based on three different questionnaires.12 The first of these
quantifying tools was a detailed demographic questionnaire, a four-page
form recording hundreds of pieces of information on every member of each
extended family encountered during an investigation. The second schedule
was an ‘anthropological questionnaire’, including no less than fifty-nine
items, from traditional anthropometric measurements to a number of ‘racial’
traits, such as skin colour, hair type and colour, eye colour, the type of
eyebrows, body hair, etc. The third sheet was a medical questionnaire, with
information concerning blood groups, family occurrence of ‘social diseases’
86 F. CASSATA

or malformations, etc. These quantitative data (demographic, anthropologi-

cal and medical) were complemented by a qualitative report, describing in
general the ecological, social, political and economic ‘environment’. All
information was collected by a research team, including assistants, students
and collaborators of Gini as well as a number of scholars hired as go-
betweens in order to establish contacts and facilitate the relationship with
local communities and public administrations.
Following these methodological procedures, the investigation on the
Albanian ‘ethnic islands’ was carried out between August and
October 1938, starting just after the launch of the ‘Race Manifesto’ in July.
The research team included Gini’s personal doctor Giovanni Cirillo, and two
statistician-demographers, Gini’s assistants Silvio Orlandi and Nora Federici.
More than two hundred families (227) were examined (119 at Carfizzi, forty-
nine at S. Nicola dell’Alto and fifty-nine at Caraffa). The demographic ques-
tionnaires were compiled by Cirillo, along with the measurement of the
basal metabolism of forty-eight individuals and the taking of twenty-seven
plaster facial casts. Federici and Orlandi filled 774 anthropometric schedules,
while local physicians dealt with the medico-biological examinations, reach-
ing the sum of 764 schedules. For the adult population, the data related to
fifty-five measurements for men and fifty-three for women, to thirteen
differences between two measurements and to sixteen indices for both
the sexes. With regard to these markers, no gradual variation was detected
with the increase in the percentage of ‘Albanian blood’, apart from the
greater length of the head of the ‘pure Calabrians’.
To complete and control these results, the Calabrian military districts
(mandamenti) were classified into seven groups according to the percen-
tage of the population represented by communes considered of Albanian
descent in the 1901 Census. For every group of communes, the C.I.S.P.
research team calculated, from the data of Livi’s Antropometria militare,
the averages relating to cephalic index, pigmentation of eyes and hair, the
percentages of soldiers less than 1.60 metres in height and of those more
than 1.70 metres. For none of these characteristics, from one group of
communes to another, was the C.I.S.P. research team able to find regular
variations on the lines it could have been expected on the basis of the
characteristics of the Albanians of Albania. After about five centuries – the
research suggested – the descendants of Albanian immigrants were com-
pletely assimilated with the surrounding Calabrian population (Gini 1949).
The second expedition on the Ligurian-Piedmontese settlements in
Sardinia – Carloforte and Calasetta – was carried out between August 1939
and April 1940. Located on the island of S. Pietro, on the southwestern coast of
Sardinia, Carloforte had been colonized between 1738 and 1742 by Ligurian
families of coral fishermen, coming from the little isle of Tabarka near Tunis,
where they had established in 1542. On the extreme edge of the island of
 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 87

S. Antioco, Calasetta is separated from Carloforte by a narrow strip of sea. In

1769, a second settlement of 38 Tabarkian-Ligurian families arrived here from
Carloforte, followed in 1773 by other settlers from Piedmont.
C.I.S.P. staff in Sardinia included Paolo Fortunati (at times professor of
statistics at the University of Palermo) for the demographic enquiries; Nora
Federici, Annibale Del Bue and Carlo Maxia (professor of human anatomy
and anthropology at the University of Cagliari) for the anthropometric
measurements, and a number of local physicians for the medical
investigations.
At Carloforte, C.I.S.P. research led to 180 demographic questionnaires,
471 anthropometric schedules, and 461 medico-biological schedules; at
Calasetta, eighty-four demographic questionnaires, 322 anthropometric
schedules, and 276 medico-biological schedules were compiled. On both
expeditions, genealogical enquiries were made in order to calculate the
percentage of ‘Sardinian’ and of ‘alien blood’, but difficulties and uncertain-
ties were met with in compiling them, particularly in the case of Calasetta.
As in the case of the Albanian ‘ethnic islands’, despite a certain differ-
entiation of the indexes for the head and the body according to the blood
percentage, the comparison between the cephalic indexes of soldiers given
in Antropometria militare and the data resulting from the C.I.S.P. investiga-
tion in 1940 showed a clear process of physical assimilation occurred in two
generations, ‘and one – Gini added – which it is difficult to ascribe to
unobserved mixtures of blood’ (Gini 1949, p.241). This conclusion was
strengthened by the examination of the colours of the eyes and hair of
the population of Carloforte. The percentage of light eyes both for the adult
population as a whole and for the ‘pure’ Tabarkian-Ligurians was definitely
inferior to that shown by the data of Antropometria militare, whereas that
then obtained for the seven purely Sardinian districts was practically the
same as the percentage calculated by the C.I.S.P. enquiry for the pure
Sardinians of Carloforte. On the contrary, the percentage of black hair,
both for the adult population as a whole and for the Tabarkian-Ligurians
considered pure, was much higher than that reported in Antropometria
militare for the soldiers of Carloforte of two generations earlier.
Gini’s conclusions followed in a straightforward way:

These comparisons, therefore, confirm the impression that in the course of the
two generations that passed between the enquiry of the Antropometria mili-
tare and that made by us, a marked process of physical assimilation has taken
place in the case of the descendants of the Ligurians, an assimilation that
contrasts with the conservation of characters which still persisted at the date
of the first enquiry. (Gini 1949, p.242)

While the expeditions on the Albanian and Ligurian ‘ethnic islands’ were
organized in Italy, the third C.I.S.P. investigation on the physical assimilation
88 F. CASSATA

of immigrants was rather complex, requiring the arrangement of an inter-

national research staff across the Atlantic. The C.I.S.P. research project on the
Italo-Americans stemmed from the scientific collaboration between Gini and
Wilton Marion Krogman, associate professor of anatomy and physical
anthropology at the Western Reserve University School of Medicine in
Cleveland. In November 1933, Krogman and Thomas Wingate Todd, head
of the Department of Anatomy, invited Gini to give the Hanna Lecture in
Cleveland. Held on 13 December, at the Medical Building, Gini’s lecture was
a general overview of C.I.S.P. activities in the field of ‘regenerative eugenics’,
significantly proposed to an audience of clinicians and social workers (Gini
1934). From the Hanna Lecture in Cleveland, the scientific collaboration
between Krogman and Gini increased. On the one hand, the C.I.S.P. decided
to publish in its series Krogman’s research on the Seminoles in Oklahoma
(Krogman 1935). On the other, Krogman and Gini started discussing
a project concerning the physical examination of the Italian community in
Cleveland. The first draft of this project was probably elaborated between
April and September 1934.13 Temporarily abandoned for political reasons in
May 1936,14 the project was reactivated in February–March 1938 by
Krogman himself, while he was moving from Western Reserve to the
Department of Anthropology of Chicago University.15 In January 1939, Gini
and Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman (which had joined the Italo-
American project three years before) met in Rome and decided to constitute
‘in America a committee of some scholars of various branches of science in
order to study the Italian immigrants in America from several points of view
(anthropological, sociological, psychological, etc.)’ in collaboration with the
C.I.S.P. in Rome.16 This American committee, linked with C.I.S.P., included
Krogman, Zimmerman and Shapiro. The initiative came to an end after
a couple of months, due to the increasing deterioration of the political
context.17 After the war, between 1954 and 1956, C.I.S.P. research on the
Italo-Americans was resumed, this time with the financial support of the
Fulbright Fund (Cassata 2006, pp.189–193). Three villages in Central and
South Italy – respectively San Giovanni Incarico, near Frosinone; Ceccano, in
Ciociaria; and Ricigliano, near Salerno – were investigated by adopting C.I.S.
P. standardized tools and elaborating the usual set of demographic, medical
and anthropometric schedules (Gini 1956). Yet, the U.S. side of the research
had to be definitely dropped in 1956 for lack of funding and, more impor-
tantly, because of the increasing mistrust of the Italo-American commu-
nities, not particularly willing to collaborate with research perceived as
potentially damaging their public image (Gini 1956, p.12).
 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 89

3. ‘I am concerned with science and not with politics’

The chronology of C.I.S.P. expeditions – 1934–36/1938–40 for the Italo-
American immigrants; August–October 1938 for the Albanian ‘colonies’;
August 1939–April 1940 for the Ligurian settlements in Sardinia; – should
not be underestimated. The C.I.S.P.’s research on the physical assimilation of
immigrants occurred, in fact, in a moment of intense ‘boundary-work’ within
the international field of eugenics, fed by increasing opposition against Nazi
Germany and its hegemony on the I.F.E.O.
Starting from 1935, Gini became a major figure in the process of institu-
tionalization of an alternative, ‘Latin’ network of eugenic organizations. In
Mexico City, between 12 and 19 October 1935, the Italian demographer was
elected president of the new International Federation of Latin Eugenic
Societies. In his inaugural speech, Gini set the agenda for the Latin
Federation along with the three fundamental tenets of his ‘regenerative
eugenics’: the rejection of neo-Malthusianism; the renewing effects of
migrations; and the relevance of ‘heterosis’ (biological improvement) in
race-crossings (Gini 1936). At the beginning of August 1937, in Paris, the
First Congress of Latin Eugenics was held (Cassata 2011, pp.180–184; Turda
and Gillette 2014, pp.185–191). It was organized in the same city of – and
just a few days after, the International Population Congress – where Franz
Boas attacked once again the positions of German eugenicists, with a paper
on Heredity and Environment, which criticized ‘the incredible amount of
amateurish work, produced for more than a century, but particularly by
modern race enthusiasts’ (Boas 1938, p.83). In Paris, as outgoing president
of the Federation, Gini exalted once again the ‘Latin’ equilibrium and
scientific objectivity against the ‘intransigent and extremist attitude’ of the
Nordic approach to eugenics (Gini 1937, pp.5–6).
The Second Congress of the International Federation of Latin Eugenic
Societies was planned to take place in Bucharest between 25 and
30 September 1939, but the outbreak of the Second World War postponed
the meeting (Turda and Gillette 2014, pp.196–198). One month before, at
the end of August, in Edinburgh, the seventh International Congress of
Genetics had been abruptly interrupted by the news of the Nazi invasion
of Poland. For both Edinburgh and the planned congress in Bucharest, Gini
had prepared a paper on C.I.S.P. researches on the physical assimilation of
immigrants.
Despite this international leading role in the field of ‘Latin’ eugenics, at
the national level, in 1937–1938, the introduction of Fascist racial legislation
along the lines of a ‘Nordic’, biological racism, came to increasingly jeopar-
dize Gini’s scientific and political authority. In 1937, together with the
promulgation of the anti-miscegenation laws in Ethiopia, Fascist authorities
intervened to censor the publication of Gini’s nuanced evaluation of race
90 F. CASSATA

crossing as a form of positive biological improvement (‘heterosis’) of the

racial stock.18 Moreover, from April to July 1938, the elaboration of the so-
called ‘Race Manifesto’ was accompanied by vicious attacks against Gini and,
more in general, ‘Latin’ eugenics. In particular, Gini’s scientific achievements
and international recognition nurtured the conflict between Pius XI and
Mussolini around the introduction in Italy of state racism based on the
‘Nordic’ model. On the one side, in April 1938, a letter from the Sacred
Congregation of Seminaries, presided over by Pius XI, condemned the
pernicious scientific racism championed by Nazi Germany and charged
Catholic academic institutions with combating these erroneous theories.
On July 23, a few days after the publication of the ‘Race Manifesto’,
L’Avvenire quoted Gini’s research and the 1937 Latin Eugenics Congress in
Paris to scientifically support the letter of the Sacred Congregation, while
criticizing ‘German racism’ and, implicitly, the Fascist ‘Race Manifesto’ (E. Fr.
1938). On the other side, in the same period, from April to July 1938, in the
context of the journalistic campaign which accompanied the launch of the
‘Race Manifesto’, Telesio Interlandi, head of Il Tevere and Mussolini’s unoffi-
cial mouthpiece,19 strongly condemned Gini’s eugenics. By labelling Gini as
a scholar ‘better known as a statistics expert than a pillar of eugenics,’
(Interlandi 1938a) Interlandi stigmatized Gini’s critical attitude toward Nazi
racial hygiene as a sort of anti-Fascist ‘zone of dissidence’ to be suffocated in
order to obtain ‘great political order’ (Interlandi 1938b).
Against this backdrop, the timing of the C.I.S.P. research program on the
physical assimilation of immigrants takes on a distinctive political as well as
scientific relevance. The C.I.S.P.’s agenda was certainly influenced by political
considerations, as Gini himself explicitly declared in a letter to Shapiro, in
December 1938: ‘This subject is specially [sic] interesting now that the racial
questions are on the stage’.20
The correspondence between Gini and Boas is even more telling of this
tension between science and politics. During the organization of the first two
expeditions, Gini wrote to Boas, asking for a copy of the final report of Changes
in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants (Boas 1928a) and for his updated
statistical database, Materials for the Study of Inheritance in Man, published in
1928 (Boas 1928b). In January 1939, replying to Gini’s request, Boas added
a critical note on the Italian situation: ‘I regret that anthropologists can follow
their German colleagues in substituting politics for science. I hope you are not
one of them.’21 Gini’s reaction came on 8 February, and it was limited to
a single, synthetic line: ‘As you know, I am concerned with science and not
with politics’.22
In those months, both Boas and Gini were actually dealing with two
different ‘Scientists’ Manifestos’. On the one side, in December 1938, Boas
had succeeded in organizing the publication of the ‘Scientists’ Manifesto’
(1,284 signatures including three Nobel laureates) against Nazi and Fascist
 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 91

‘pseudo-scientific racialism’ (Barkan 1992, 336–337). On the other, since

August 1938, Gini incorporated the Boasian research agenda into a new
‘Latin’ eugenic model, which was at odds with the ‘Aryan racial theory’ and
the rigid Nordic-Aryan hereditarianism of the ‘Race Manifesto’.
In the name of the ‘neutrality’ of science, different agendas with different
goals could be pursued, while sharing the same research model: on the one
hand, Franz Boas was conducting a campaign against Hitler’s science; on the
other, Gini was countering the 1938 ‘Race Manifesto’, stigmatized as a mere
political document, with a different, ‘Latin’ alternative, considered as
a scientific and neutral basis for Fascist racism.

4. Conclusion
This article has analysed the reception and circulation in Fascist Italy of
a Boasian research agenda through the organization of C.I.S.P. field investi-
gations, intended not only to confirm Boas’ studies but also to reframe them
in a new, ‘Latin’ eugenic context.
As the narrow lens of the physical assimilation of immigrants shows with
evidence, a more in-depth analysis of C.I.S.P. activities may open a window on
several interesting lines of research. First of all, despite the growing scholarly
interest on the history of ‘Latin’ eugenics, concrete scientific practices imple-
mented by ‘Latin’ eugenicists have so far attracted scarce attention. From this
perspective, C.I.S.P. research programs provide not only an interesting example
of transnational circulation of eugenic, anthropological and demographic
knowledge, but also illustrate a complete picture of the relationships between
theoretical eugenic and racial frameworks, on the one hand, and field investi-
gations on immigrants, ‘hybrids’, human isolates, etc. on the other.
Secondly, this article demonstrates how, in the 1930s-40s, the opposition
to Nazi racial hygiene contributed to the crystallization of a strategic alli-
ance, in the field of ‘racial science’, between ‘Latin’ eugenics and ‘Boasian’
anti-racism. The temporary and contingent nature of this convergence was
thoroughly revealed by the post-war controversies surrounding the two first
UNESCO Statements on Race, in 1950–1951, considered by historiography as
a defining moment in the post-war demise of scientific racism.23 The U.N.E.S.
C.O. initiative disrupted the temporary convergence described in this article:
on the one side, the role of ‘Boasian’ anthropologists – particularly Ashley
Montagu – was crucial in drafting the first Statement, while Harry L. Shapiro
was among the authors of the second, revised version; on the other side,
Gini harshly contested the U.N.E.S.C.O. anti-racist agenda, both on political
and scientific grounds: according to the Italian statistician, the 1950–1951
Statements on Race were a political and ideological act seeking to super-
impose a liberal, democratic, and anti-fascist orthodoxy over the scientific
study of human biological differences. In this new context, the C.I.S.P.’s
92 F. CASSATA

research on the physical assimilation of immigrants was reshaped into

a broader ‘theory of adaptive mutations’, which opposed U.N.E.S.C.O.’s
scientific egalitarianism in the name of an environmental and ecological
form of racial classification. Significantly, in the 1960s, without renouncing
his ‘Boasian’ environmentalism and without any concession to ‘anti-Boasian’
anti-Semitism, Gini joined the anti-U.N.E.S.C.O. campaign of the International
Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics (I.A.A.E.E.),24
a powerful organization of anti-egalitarian racial scientists, politically con-
nected with American and European far right movements, and financially
supported by the donations of the textile tycoon Wickliffe Draper’s Pioneer
Fund (Tucker 2002).25
Finally, the C.I.S.P.’s complex action in the field of eugenic and population
studies suggests considering the genesis of the ‘Race Manifesto’, in July 1938,
within a much broader and comparative framework: how did the transnational
field of racial science react to the publication of this document? How was the
ideology of the ‘neutrality of science’ challenged by the ‘Race Manifesto’? The
aim of this article was to start responding to these questions, by focusing on the
scientific connection between Franz Boas and Corrado Gini, and their different
negotiation of the relationship between science and politics.

Notes
1. On C.I.S.P., see Cassata 2006, pp.130–142, 2011, pp.172–192; Berlivet 2016.
2. C.I.S.P. investigations on Albanian and Ligurian ‘ethnic islands’ were the sub-
ject of Gini’s presentations at the International Genetics Congresses of
Stockholm (8th Congress, 1948) and Bellagio (9th Congress, 1953), and at the
first International Congress of Human Genetics in Copenhagen (1956). C.I.S.P.
organized two more expeditions in 1952 to Carloforte and in 1953 to
Calasetta. During these investigations, special attention was given to the
analysis of the eyes and hair colour of children gathered in seaside holiday
camps, in order to measure the different levels of assimilation.
3. On the complex history of the so-called ‘Race Manifesto’, see in particular:
Raspanti 1994 and Gillette 2001.
4. Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS), Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri (P.C.
M.), 1940–1943, b. 2674, f. 1.1.16.3.5.27.000-7, sf. 3, letter of the presidency of I.
S.T.A.T. to the Ministry of National Education, 26 September 1935.
5. ACS, Archivio Gini (new section), minutes of C.I.S.P. board, 19 July 1935.
6. ACS, PCM, 1940-43, b. 2674, f. 1.1.16.3.5.27.000-7, sf. 3, letter of the presidency
of I.S.T.A.T. to the Ministry of National Education, 26 September 1935.
7. Particularly interesting, on this point, Gini’s letter to Frank Lorimer, secretary of
the Population Association of America, on April 1935: ‘Our Committee had
separated itself from the International Union since the Congress held in Rome
in which the International Union did not participate. The convocation of the
Congress in Berlin is now another reason to confirm our separation from the
said Union. Our Committee thinks that it is more profitable to collaborate
directly with the different bodies which, in the various countries, work
 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 93

independently on scientific lines upon the population problems and would be

very pleased to establish in this aim a closer connection with your association’.
ACS, Archivio Gini (new section), Gini to Lorimer, 23 April 1935.
8. ACS, Archivio Gini (new section), minutes of C.I.S.P. board, resumé of C.I.S.P.
activities, undated.
9. ACS, Archivio Gini (new section), Shapiro to Gini, 14 July 1932.
10. ACS, Archivio Gini (new section), Dino Camavitto to Shapiro,
23 November 1936. In April 30, 1936, invited by Shapiro, Gini had partecipated
to the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropology,
held at the Institute of Human Relation in Yale. On this occasion, Gini talked
about C.I.S.P. researches on ‘isolated groups’.
11. ACS, Archivio Gini (new section), Gini to Zimmerman, 22 March 1939.
12. On C.I.S.P. methodological tools, Berlivet 2016 is particularly insightful.
13. ACS, Archivo Gini (new section), Gini to Krogman, 3 April 1934.
14. ACS, Archivo Gini (new section), Gini to Krogman, 20 May 1936.
15. ACS, Archivio Gini (new section), Krogman to Gini, 10 February 1938.
16. ACS, Archivio Gini (new section), Gini to Krogman, 26 February 1939.
17. ACS, Archivio Gini (new section), Zimmerman to Gini, March 3, 1939.
18. ACS, Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione (MPI), Direzione Generale Istruzione
Superiore (DGIS), Professori Universitari Epurati, 1944–1946, b. 16, f. “Gini”:
declaration by Genesio Eugenio Del Monte, 7 November 1944.
19. On Telesio Interlandi, see in particular Cassata 2008.
20. ACS, Archivio Gini (new section), Gini to Shapiro, 14 December 1938.
21. American Philosophical Society (APS), Franz Boas Papers, Boas to Gini,
21 January 1939.
22. APS, Franz Boas Papers, Gini to Boas, 8 February 1939.
23. On the history of UNESCO Statements on Race, see in particular Pogliano 2005,
pp.145–210; Brattain 2007; Müller-Wille 2007; Gil-Riaño 2018.
24. Gini’s ‘theorem of adaptive mutations’ was clearly expressed in two articles,
initially published on Genus (Gini 1995, 1960a), C.I.S.P. organ since 1934, and
then translated for The Mankind Quarterly, organ of the I.A.A.E.E. (Gini 1960b,
1961).
25. Gini was a member of the executive committee of the I.A.A.E.E. as well as
a member of the advisory board of The Mankind Quarterly, organ of the I.A.A.E.
E. based in Edinburgh and published since June 1960: on this see Cassata
2011, pp.362–379; Kühl 2013, pp.157–180.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Ernest Ialongo, Annalisa Capristo and Natalia Indrimi for their
insightful comments on a previous version of this article. I am grateful to the
archivists Margherita Martelli and Raffaella Barbacini, and the student Muriel Della
Valle, for their invaluable assistance in dealing with the new, uninventoried section
of Gini Papers, at the Central State Archive in Rome.

Notes on contributor
Francesco Cassata is Full Professor of Contemporary History at the University of
Genoa. He has published on the history of eugenics and scientific racism in Italy, on
94 F. CASSATA

the history of Lysenkoism in Italy, on the Italian geneticist Adriano Buzzati-Traverso

and the International Laboratory of Genetics and Biophysics in Naples (1962–69).
Select publications: Science Fiction? Seventh Primo Levi Lecture (Einaudi, 2016);
Eugenetica senza tabù. Usi e abusi di un concetto (Einaudi, 2015); L’Italia intelligente.
Adriano Buzzati-Traverso e il Laboratorio internazionale di genetica e biofisica
(1962–1969) (Donzelli, 2013); Building the New Man. Eugenics, Racial Science and
Genetics in Twentieth-Century Italy (CEU Press, 2011).

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