Gene Weltfish

Among the data used in the text was an IQ study from World War I, which found higher scores among some northern Blacks in the United States forces than among some southern Whites.

Two weeks before appearing at a 1953 hearing, in which she refused to answer questions from staffer attorney Roy Cohn and Senator Joseph McCarthy as to whether she was a communist, her 16-year appointment at Columbia was terminated.

Regina Weltfish was one of two daughters; she was born in 1902 into a German Jewish family in New York City's Lower East Side.

Encouraged by her grandmother, she went to the synagogue daily to say the kaddish for him during the first year after his death, an honor and responsibility traditionally reserved for a son.

Happening to meet Henry Moses, a Pawnee in New York, Weltfish decided to study his tribe as the subject of her dissertation.

At that time Columbia modified its policy requiring that grad students pay to publish dissertations (at a cost of $4,000) and began accepting copies of mimeographed theses.

[9] The publication of this pamphlet and the subsequent political furor that it caused during the 1950s, when it was decried as a piece of socialist propaganda, attracted the attention of anti-Communist authorities.

[10] The authors recounted some results of IQ tests, which were first administered to the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in World War I.

Weltfish and Benedict devoted most of pamphlet to explaining that perceived differences in group mental abilities vary in accordance with social and cultural factors, not biological ones.

In 1942, after [Boas'] death, Ruth Benedict, my senior colleague in the Anthropology Department, and I felt that we should carry the banner on the race question.

"Some far-right political groups in the US still consider Weltfish's work to be part of a conspiracy by Boas and his students to eliminate the study of race in psychology and anthropology in "preparation for the defeat of 'White Civilization' by the Jews".

The FBI investigated Weltfish's activities, noting her political engagement in the Congress of American Women, her signatures on civil rights petitions, and her appearance on the radio station WNBC.

[14] In 1952 Weltfish was quoted in the Daily Worker as repeating a claim made by Soviet critics that the US Army had used germ warfare in the Korean War.

Two weeks before she was scheduled to appear, Weltfish was told by the trustees of Columbia that her employment contract would not be renewed at the end of the year.

Later historians have concluded that she was fired because the trustees saw her as a political liability, who could threaten funding, in the tense and charged environment during the years of the red scare.

[14] When asked about the nature of the claim made in the pamphlet that some northern blacks had scored higher on intelligence tests than southern whites, Weltfish responded that particular data set was from the US Army's records.

[20] Having lost her employment at Columbia, Weltfish was effectively blacklisted and remained unable to find a teaching position for the next eight years.