Thomas Jefferson's Theory of the Super Lion, and a Different Sort of Environmental Racism

Most people would likely be surprised to hear that 18^th century European Americans did not think of Africans, African Americans, or Native Americans as innately inferior.  The concept of innate inferiority was actually a later development, beginning around the time of Jefferson’s presidency in 1800, and brought on partly by the need to justify slavery in a post-Revolutionary age obsessed with independence and equality.    

Prior to this, the imagined inferiority of people of color was considered an environmental problem: because all people had sprung from the same source – i.e., Genesis – people were innately equal.  However, according to Enlightenment thinking and to popular culture, as people spread across the globe, they were deeply and often negatively affected by their environments.  An average European American prior to the Revolution would have considered everything from perceived savagery to dark skin to be a deleterious effect of a harmful, non-European environment. 

Many Europeans worried that Americans would gradually succumb to the environmental pressures that caused Native American savagery; they took the wildness and violence of Western settlement as evidence of this.  Jefferson, always ready to argue for the superiority of everything American, argued that while the African environment certainly had led to inferiority amongst Africans, that Native Americans were not inferior at all.  To claim Native American inferiority would have meant admitting  the inferiority of the American environment.  In his own words, the Native American was “in body and mind the equal of the white man.”  However, rather than leading him to value the existing cultures of the indigenous peoples, this belief led Jefferson and his followers to more fervently engage in the colonial project of proving that Native Americans could be converted to European American ways.  Towards this end, Jefferson studied Native Americans passionately: he spent thirty years studying indigenous languages, although after his presidency, his work on Native American languages was stolen as his library was shipped back to Monticello. 

The inferiority of the American climate was also the subject of much European scientific literature.  The great French naturalist of the Western world, Buffon, influentially wrote that the life forms of the New World were underdeveloped, pointing out that the New World had no lions or elephants because the weak American environment could not support such rigorous life forms.  He apparently didn’t see the irony that these animals lived in Africa but not Europe.

The only book that Jefferson ever wrote, Notes on the State of Virginia, took Buffon to task.  In charts that are often edited out of current editions, Jefferson weighed American animals against European ones, finding that while the average European bear weighed 153.7 pounds, the American weighed 400; that the American cow weighed 2,500 pounds to the European 763.  Jefferson sent Buffon enormous moose antlers and numerous specimens, forcing Buffon to revise his work.  

Jefferson wasn’t done with Buffon though.  The following quote is straight from the book Empire of Liberty, the second volume of the Oxford History of the United States: “In the mid-1790s on the basis of some fossil remains, probably belonging to a prehistoric sloth, he [Jefferson] concocted the existence of a huge super-lion, three times bigger than the African lion, and presented his imagined beast to the scientific world as the Megalonyx, ‘The Great Claw.’”  It gets even better: when Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition to chart the West, he did so expecting that Megalonyx’s and Mammoths were still walking the Western earth, and hoped that specimens of these super creatures would demolish the Old World notions of New World inferiority once and for all.  

Jefferson's Megalonyx presentation to the American Philosophical Society initiated vertebrate paleontology in the United States.  The great prehistoric sloth remains known as the Megalonyx Jeffersonii.

The Great Depression, Emasculation, and the Crackdown on Queer Culture

I recently found some notes I had taken two years ago while reading George Chauncey’s “Why Marriage: The History Shaping Today’s Debate Over Marriage Equality”.  In a future post, I hope to revisit that book and tell that history in a two-page article, accessible to middle-school students, clearly describing the historical contexts of shifting understandings of marriage since the 1850's.  For now, here is some interesting history that shows, among other things, that history is not always a story of progress, but simply of continuous change; that understandings of gender are sometimes intimately connected to politics and propaganda; and that hard times often lead to fear, which often leads to prejudice.   

The first time I encountered the thriving world of 1920’s LGBT culture was as an 18-year old completely obsessed with the European avant-garde.  However, I didn’t stop and wonder, “wait a second, these public displays of homosexuality were accepted?”  I had to wait to wonder this until I was 27 and spent a summer immersed in Hemingway, who described in homophobic terms the gay men he ran into in 1920’s Europe.  (Hemingway remains one of my favorite authors: while a misogynist and homophobe in many ways, he also loved Gertrude Stein, who wrote that during their many conversations they often talked about homosexuality.  He was a complicated man). 

A year later I was reading the incredible literature of the Harlem Renaissance, which is filled with gay characters.  It was clear that not only the European night life but urban American life in the 1920’s was far more accepting of queer culture than what I had been led to believe by my knowledge of how gays were treated during the postwar years.  During the Jazz Age Americans from many walks of life had openly enjoyed the fruits of queer cosmopolitan culture: not only were some of the most popular entertainers of the day quite flamboyant, there was a general acceptance in some cities of drag queens and kings.  What had happened?

In 1927, a year in which a wildly popular lesbian drama was on Broadway, New York banned all portrayals of homosexuality on the stage.  The law was part of a wider crackdown on homosexuality stimulated by a crisis of masculinity experienced during the Great Depression.  Across the country, men who were no longer able to support their families fled in shame.  It was not rare for men in this position to take their own lives.  When the New Deal was implemented in 1933, it entered the emasculation crisis by firing working women who were married in order to open up spaces for men.  The first major New Deal program, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), was a direct attempt by the government to offer men their masculinity back: the propaganda for the CCC showed tough, determined men engaged in physical labor, and it's slogan was "We can take it!"  Over 9 years, 2.5 million men participated, receiving 30$ a month, as well as the psychological benefit of feeling masculine once again. 

On the surface, such a program seems to have nothing to do with demonizing gay men.  But from the notes I took on Chauncey, it appears that the masculinization projects of the Great Depression had this effect, either purposefully or as a by-product of looking down on effeminate men..  During the Jazz Age, the effeminate man and the gay man were not publicly perceived as posing a threat to masculinity or to straightness: straight men mingling with queer men was not considered unusual or problematic.    

I would like to know more about how that perceived threat to masculinity arose, as well as more about the psychology of that threat, especially considering that I see it all the time in the homophobia in the communities and classrooms I work in.  I find it fascinating that historical shifts can so easily throw society into fits of fear and prejudice... or into openness.  I sometimes feel that there is a proliferation of lessons examining the contexts in which fear and oppression arise.  It would invaluable for students to analyze moments where great openness occurs as well.  The history of how gay marriage came to be conceivable, and then possible, would be an analysis of both moments. 

"We can take it!" A photo from the CCC propaganda campaign by Wilfred J. Mead.