Ashley Montagu

UXL Encyclopedia of World Biography, (2003)

Ashley Montagu

Anthropologist and educator Ashley Montagu (1905-1999) focused on human bio-social evolution and maintained throughout his long career that cultural phenomena are not genetically predetermined. In more than 50 books published for both an academic and general readership, Montagu broadened understanding of human social evolution. His topics ranged from human aggression and the use of profanity to infant nurturing, the importance of touch, and the nature of human love.

Montagu committed himself to popularizing the findings of modern science in the hopes of improving civil society and the quality of life. He brought his message to the public not only in books, but also in college classrooms, lecture halls, articles appearing in periodicals ranging from the Washington Post to Ladies' Home Journal, and appearances on popular television talk shows.

Took Aristocratic Name

The son of Jewish tailor Charles Ehrenberg and his wife, Mary Plot Ehrenberg, Montagu was born Israel Ehrenberg on June 28, 1905. He was raised in London's working class East End neighborhood. It is not known why he decided to change his name, but it may have been due to prejudice against East End Jews in those days. The young boy's decision to take the aristocratic name Ashley Montagu distanced him from his father's Polish and his mother's Russian ethnic roots.

By age ten Montagu was a keen observer of human behavior, and he closely studied the linguistic differences between his Cockney neighbors and the more educated university students who rented rooms in his parents' home. Anatomy was another interest—one that would continue throughout Montagu's life—and in 1917 he made an unannounced visit to British anatomist Sir Arthur Keith, hoping Keith would help him identify a skull Montagu found. Keith was so impressed that he invited the 12-year-old to visit him at the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons and continue his study of anatomy.

Many adults encouraged young Montagu's intelligence and curiosity, and he read philosophers such as John Stuart Mill, Thomas Henry Huxley, and Friedrich Nietzsche at a relatively young age. His interests included biology, psychology, and anthropology. When he was 15, Montagu won a literary contest and chose as his prize a book titled Introduction to Social Psychology. His early interest in the relationship between environment and behavior foreshadowed Montagu's long career in the social sciences.

Published Works on Race

After completing his secondary education in London, in 1922 Montagu enrolled at the University of London and spent the next three years studying anthropology. Witnessing the British government's harsh treatment of striking workers during a general labor strike in 1926 prompted the idealistic 21-year-old to leave England. In late 1927 he arrived in New York City and took several classes at Columbia University. He was quoted in a Los Angeles Times obituary as once commenting: "I was brought up as a stuffed shirt Englishman. I wasn't very human. What America did for me was humanize me, democratize me." Traveling to Italy in 1928, he took classes in ethnography and anthropology at the University of Florence, broadening his knowledge and developing the framework for his compelling arguments against biologically determined concepts of race. In 1931, while working as an assistant professor of anthropology at New York University, Montagu married Marjorie Peakes; the couple would have two daughters, Audrey and Barbara, and a son, Geoffrey. In 1934, Montagu resumed his studies at Columbia and earned his Ph.D. there in 1936 under noted professors Franz Boaz and Ruth Benedict. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1940.

In 1937 Montagu published his first book, Coming into Being among the Australian Aborigines, which was based on his dissertation. As a newly graduated Ph.D., he left New York University and joined the staff of Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia in 1938. While at Hahnemann, he published a number of papers on the topic of race. With the rise of Nazism and anti-Semitism and the persistence of American racial segregation, Montagu decided that his ideas would be valuable to the public, and he condensed them in the seminal 1942 work Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. In it, he challenged the then largely accepted notion that characteristics based on race were a biological construct. He argued that since humans in all parts of the world developed in hunter-gatherer societies, the challenges they faced in order to survive were similar and their mental capacities equivalent. Given similar genetic traits, differences in the development of human cultures in different parts of the globe must have been caused by external conditions, such as geography, climate, and the availability of natural resources, he argued.

Man's Most Dangerous Myth was highly influential, and Montagu's argument revolutionized the perception of race. In 1949 he was asked to serve on a United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) task force and became the principal author of that committee's "Statement on Race." Montagu was not, however, an ardent UN backer. He once commented: "Most of the United Nations is really a forum for the exhibition of national prejudices on a hitherto unprecedented scale. … It's a colossal disaster. What it reflects, of course, is the dehumanization of human beings as human beings." Man's Most Dangerous Myth was revised several times, including in the 1990s to incorporate Montagu's thoughts on ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and several African nations and the debate over IQ testing, affirmative action, and race. Considered a classic, the book remained in print 60 years after it was first published. Others expanded on Montagu's ideas in the 1975 book Race and IQ, a collection of essays edited by Montagu.