United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation

The FBI established this classification when it assumed responsibility for ascertaining the protection capabilities and weaknesses of defense plants. Each plant survey was a separate case file, with the survey, supplemental surveys, and all communications dealing with a plant insofar as plant protection was concerned, filed together. On June 1, 1941, and January 5, 1942, the Navy and Army, respectively, assumed responsibility for surveying defense plants in which they had interests. Thereafter, FBI involvement in plant surveys was minimal. Initially the surveys were very detailed, with descriptive and quantitative data on all aspects of the plants being surveyed. By 1941 the surveys contained less detail on the overall operations of the plants surveyed with more emphasis on those aspects the surveyor believed constituted weaknesses in the plant protective system. Early in 1945 the Bureau began undertaking supplemental surveys to ascertain whether recommendations made during earlier surveys had been implemented and to include changes in the plants due to their expanded activities or size. This classification is obsolete.

From the description of Disposition Authorities for Individual Classifications for Headquarters Case Files. Part B: Classification 99. Plant Protection Survey. (Unknown). WorldCat record id: 122456569

Mildred McAdory, known as Mildred Edelman, was apparently a member of the Communist Party, USA who was active in the Southern Negro Youth Congress. In 1943 she was arrested for violating segregation ordinances on a Birmingham, Alabama city bus.

From the guide to the Mildred McAdory FBI Files, 1940s-ca.1960, (Tamiment Library / Wagner Archives)

Al Lannon (1907-1969), born Albert Vetere, was an Italian American Communist and a leading figure in the Communist Party USA's orgainizing and labor union activism involving merchant mariners and stevedores, from 1930 through 1955, when he was convicted under the Smith Act (1940), of advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, and served a year in prison. As an organizer for the Waterfront Sections of both the CPUSA, and for the New York State CP, he was one of the founders of the National Maritime Union, which represented merchant mariners on the East and Gulf coasts, and on the Great Lakes. He also led an ultimately unsuccessful drive to organize stevedores in the same area. From 1943-45 he was District Organizer of the Party's Maryland-Washington, DC district. In 1957 he moved to San Francisco, California, and remained a rank and file Communist activist, along with his wife Elva, until his death.

From the guide to the Al Lannon FBI Files, 1930s-1960s, (Tamiment Library / Wagner Archives)

Material requested of the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act by Tom Knudson, staff writer for the Sacramento Bee, who did an article "The FBI targets a literary icon, " Sunday, July 3, 1994.

From the description of Declassified FBI files for Bernard De Voto, 1948-1949. (Unknown). WorldCat record id: 754863220

A branch of the United States Dept. of Justice.

From the description of Files, 1969-1972 (inclusive). (Harvard University). WorldCat record id: 232006996

Between 1961 and 1963, federal agents began wire tapping conversations between Angelo DeCarlo and his mob associates. These wire taps revealed corruption among law enforcement, prominent businessmen and state officials, including New Jersey U.S. Congressman Peter Rodino, Newark Mayor Hugh Addonizio and influential Hudson County politician John J. Kenny.

From the description of Angelo DeCarlo Tape transcripts, 1962-1965. (Plainview-Old Bethpage Public Library). WorldCat record id: 652479911

Joshua B. Freeman is a historian whose research focuses on U.S. labor history and the U.S. in the twentieth century. Freeman obtained a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1970 and went on to earn a master's degree in 1976 and a Ph.D. in 1983, both from Rutgers University. He is the author of In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933-1966, which details the formation and development of the TWU, with particular emphasis on the role of Communists and veterans of the Irish Republican Army. He also wrote Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II and co-authored Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society Vol. II . In 1987 he was appointed an assistant professor at Columbia University, and became an associate professor in 1991. Freeman is currently a professor at Queens College, City University of New York. He serves on the editorial board of the journal International Labor and Working-Class History and is a consulting editor for the New Labor Forum .

From the guide to the Joshua B. Freeman Research Files on the Transport Workers Union of America, Bulk, 1940-1952, 1940s-1996, undated, (Tamiment Library / Wagner Archives)

Camp Midvale was a recreation camp built in the 1920s by The Nature Friends of America (NFA) and owned by the Labor Lyceum (a progressive workers educational organization). NFA's goals were to provide workers with affordable outdoor recreation and to preserve wildlife. NFA was placed on the Attorney General's list of "subversive organizations" in 1947, and in 1968 Camp Midvale was given to the Ethical Culture Society in the hope that it would be preserved as an ecological retreat.

From the guide to the Camp Midvale/Nature Friends of America: FOIA Files, undated, (Tamiment Library / Wagner Archives)

Born in 1904 to working class parents in Detroit, Ralph Bunche graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1927 and Harvard Graduate School in 1928. Bunche taught in the Department of Political Science at Howard University in Washington, D.C., worked with the Carnergie Corporation and the Department of State before joining the Permanent Secretariat of the United Nations in 1948. Investigations of Bunche's activities were conducted under the Hatch Act in 1940-42 and the Loyalty Act in 1953-54. During the 1930s and 1940s, he was associated with various organizations on the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations, among them the National Negro Congress which he co-founded, and was designated for custodial detention in the event of a national emergency by the FBI in 1941. He was cleared by the International Organizations Employees Loyalty Board in 1954.

From the description of Ralph Bunche FBI file, 1940-1963. (New York Public Library). WorldCat record id: 603596301

PM (1940-48) was a progressive New York City daily tabloid format newspaper that supported the extension of the New Deal and good relations with the Soviet Union, and opposed U.S. foreign policy and the rise of the Cold War and of domestic anti-communism. PM (the name stood for Picture Magazine), borrowed many elements from weekly newsmagazines, and it accepted no advertising in an attempt to be free of pressure from business interests. PM was published by Ralph Ingersoll and financed by the Chicago millionaire Marshall Field III. Circulation averaged at 165,000, less than the 225,000 it would need to break even. Notable contributors included Heywood Broun, McGeorge Bundy, Erskine Caldwell, Malcolm Cowley, Ben Hecht, Ernest Hemingway, Penn Kimball, Eugene Lyons, Tip O'Neill, Saul K. Padover, Dorothy Parker, Ben Stolberg, I.F. Stone, James Thurber, James Wechsler, and cartoonist Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss).

From the guide to the PM, : FBI Files, undated, (Tamiment Library / Wagner Archives)

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated the dissapearance of Amelia Earhart, 1937-1947, 1967, the activities of the National Organization for Women, 1969-1975, and Eleanor Flexner, 1944-1959.

From the description of Files, 1937-1975 (inclusive). (Harvard University). WorldCat record id: 122413602

Walter Scott Neff was a psychologist and author of several books, including Work and Human Behavior, and was also head of the American Peace Mobilization, a Communist-associated organization, founded in 1940.

From the guide to the Walter Scott Neff FOIA Files, undated, (Tamiment Library / Wagner Archives)

Established in 1908, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is the principal investigative arm of the U.S. Department of Justice.

From the description of Security file on J. Robert Oppenheimer [microform], 1947-1964. (Unknown). WorldCat record id: 79756872

Senator Burton K. Wheeler (1882-1975) began his law career in Butte, and served as U.S. Attorney for Montana from 1913 to 1918 prior to his election to the U.S. Senate in 1922. His first action in the Senate was to begin investigations of corruption in the Dept. of Justice which resulted in the resignation of the head of the Bureau of Investigation. Within six months the Bureau of Investigation, seeking revenge, attempted to frame the senator. The case resulted in Wheeler being acquitted and becoming a national political figure, which standing was increased in 1924 when he ran for vice-president on the Progressive Party presidential ticket. Wheeler is remembered as one of the most powerful senators in Washington D.C. in the 1930s. Chairman of the Interstate Commerce Committee and of the Indian Affairs Committee, he personally influenced such key New Deal legislation as the Public Utilities Holding Company Act of 1935 and the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (the Wheeler-Howard Act). In 1937 he successfully led the opposition to Pres. Roosevelt's attempt to pack the Supreme Court with justices of his own political persuasion. Throughout his years of service he was consistently opposed to war, and so supported neutrality legislation in the 1930s, spoke out against peacetime conscription in 1940 and 1941, and fought against the Lend-Lease aid to Britain in 1941. After the U.S. decided to enter the war, however, Wheeler gave his full support to the effort.

From the description of Burton K. Wheeler files, 1924-1945. (Montana State University Bozeman Library). WorldCat record id: 70925419

Audley (Queen Mother) Moore, an African American black nationalist and communist, was borh in 1898 in New Iberia, Louisiana, in 1891. In 1919 she joined Marcus Garvey’s black nationalist movement, and in the 1920s, moved to New York City to work in Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. In 1936 she joined the Communist Party, was active in its Harlem section, becoming its secretary in 1941, and in 1942, secretary of the New York State Party organization. In the late 1940s she began to assert the African American national question within the Party, and left the Party in 1950. In the 1950s she founded the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women, in 1959 tutored the young Malcolm X, in 1963 she established a Reparations Committee to advocate compensatory payment to descendants of slaves, and in 1968 participated in the declaration of the Republic of New Africa and initiated its statement of independence.

From the guide to the Audley Moore: FOIA File (United States Federal Bureau of Investigation), 1940s-1960s, undated, (Tamiment Library / Wagner Archives)

Huey Pierce Long was born on August 30, 1893, in Winnfield, La. He briefly attended the University of Oklahoma School of Law in Norman, Okla., and later Tulane University Law School in New Orleans, La. He practiced law in Winnfield and later in Shreveport, La. Long was a member of the Louisiana Railroad Commission (later the Louisiana Public Service Commission) (1918-1928), governor of Louisiana (1928-1932), and U.S. senator from Louisiana (1932-1935). Charismatic and immensely popular for his social reform programs, Long was accused by his opponents of dictatorial tendencies for his near-total control of the state government. He was shot on September 8, 1935, at the Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge and died two days later at the age of 42.

From the description of Huey P. Long files, 1932-1969 (bulk 1934-1939). (Louisiana State University). WorldCat record id: 196451981

Jack Bjoze was a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. He was subsequently the executive secretary of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB) in the early 1940s. He also served in the U. S. Army during the Second World War.

From the guide to the Jack Bjoze: Freedom of Information Act Files, Bulk, 1944-1959, circa 1944-2009, (Tamiment Library / Wagner Archives)

During the 1980s, Samuel Gruber, a former attorney for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), provided the union with the financial support to file a Freedom of Information Act request. In this request, the union sought the release of all declassified files pertaining to the UE and its leadership. Another former UE legal counsel, Marshall Perlin, managed this request. After several appeals, the UE finally won its request and acquired copies of the federal government's files on the union and its members. The union soon discovered that much of the released information was redacted so heavily that the files were often unintelligible. This caused Perlin to once again appeal to the courts. In 1998, the Samuel Gruber Education Project donated approximately 35 cubic feet of released information contained in 90,000 pages of FBI files on the union to the University of Pittsburghs archives. In 1999 the group donated additional information to the archives. Other materials were sent directly to the archives by the government agencies as the copying was completed.

From the description of Records of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), 1940-1985. (University of Pittsburgh). WorldCat record id: 301734079

In 1963 the FBI sent several agents to St. Augustine, Florida, to monitor the rapidly increasing racial tension there. Local civil rights leaders were demonstrating for the desegregation of all of St. Augustine's public facilities and were being met with hostile resistance from local white officials, business owners, and law enforcement officers. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference became involved in an effort to bring national media attention to the injustices in St. Augustine. Citing a hostile racial climate, King and other civil rights leaders compared the situation in St. Augustine to other hotbeds for racial tension in the South like Albany, Georgia and Birmingham, Alabama.

From the description of Federal Bureau of Investigation St. Augustine Surveillance Files, 1963-1967. (University of Florida). WorldCat record id: 30485677

The West Indies National Council (WINC), formerly West Indian National Emergency Committee was founded in June 1940 by Wilfred Adolphus Domingo. Its broad objective was to lend support to the British West Indian territories' efforts to gain "self determination, self government" and prevent United States intervention in the islands' democratic processes. The WINC directorate included W.A. Domingo, Hope R. Stevens, Charles Petioni, H.P. Osborne, Richard B. Moore, Arthur King, Ivy Bailey Essien and Amy Ashwood Garvey. Because of their nationalist ideologies, association with radical or liberal organizations and their anti-colonialist political position, the FBI closely scrutinized the WINC for their alleged "subversive activities in the West Indies."

From the description of West Indies National Council collection, 1922-1926. (New York Public Library). WorldCat record id: 122570577

Federal agency charged with investigating domestic threats to national security.

From the description of Declassified FBI files for Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, 1942-1967. (Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison). WorldCat record id: 122364662

Vito Marcantonio (1902-1954), who received his law degree from New York University in 1931, was an American Labor Party leader and U.S. Congressmen representing East Harlem, New York, 1935-1937 (as a Republican), and 1939-1951 (American Labor Party), who was also known for generally being politically close to the Communist Party (he opposed U.S. entry into the Korean War), and as an advocate for the rights of Italian Americans, Puerto Ricans, and African Americans.

From the guide to the Vito Marcantonio FOIA Files, undated, (Tamiment Library / Wagner Archives)

Ermie Lazar is an independent scholar of U.S. right wing movements and anti-communism. Over the past decades he has obtained numerous FBI files under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

From the guide to the Ernie Lazar FBI FOIA Files on Anti-Communism and Right Wing Movements, 1934-1986, (Tamiment Library / Wagner Archives)

Founded in 1937 by Max Yergan and Paul Robeson, the Council on African Affairs (CAA) was an independent, non-profit organization "dedicated to serving the interests of the peoples of Africa" and had a self-described unique "full-time and year-round job of providing Americans with the truth about Africa." This was achieved through the monthly "Spotlight on Africa" newsletter and other publications. The Council's other major function was to act as the channel of concrete assistance from Americans to Africans, sending money to aid the South African people's struggle against Malan's apartheid government.

From the description of Council on African Affairs/Freedom of Information Act collection, 1949-1972 (bulk 1952-1954) (New York Public Library). WorldCat record id: 668455300

Unclaimed stolen photographs and manuscript materials recoved by the FBI.

From the description of Stolen property from libraries : Federal Bureau of Investigation case, 1862-1956 [manuscript] (Denver Public Library). WorldCat record id: 743097324

From the description of Stolen property from libraries : Federal Bureau of Investigation case, 1862-1956 [manuscript] (Denver Public Library). WorldCat record id: 743100797

Senator Burton K. Wheeler (1882-1975) began his law career in Butte, and served as U.S. Attorney for Montana from 1913 to 1918 prior to his election to the U.S. Senate in 1922. His first action in the senate was to begin investigations of corruption in the Department of Justice which resulted in the resignation of the head of the Bureau of Investigation. Within six months, the Bureau of Investigation, seeking revenge, attempted to frame the senator. The case resulted in Wheeler being acquitted and becoming a national political figure, which standing was increased in 1924 when he ran for vice-president on the Progressive Party presidential ticket. Wheeler is remembered as one of the most powerful senators in Washington D.C. in the 1930s. Chairman of the Interstate Commerce Committee and of the Indian Affairs Committee, he personally influenced such key New Deal legislation as the Public Utilities Holding Company Act of 1935 and the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (the Wheeler-Howard Act). In 1937, he successfully led the opposition to President Roosevelt's attempt to pack the Supreme Court with justices of his own political persuasion. Throughout his years of service he was consistently opposed to war, and so supported neutrality legislation in the 1930s, spoke out against peacetime conscription in 1940 and 1941, and fought against the Lend-Lease aid to Britain in 1941. After the United States decided to enter the war, however, Wheeler gave his full support to the effort.

From the guide to the Burton K. Wheeler Files, 1924-1945, (Montana State University-Bozeman Library, Merrill G Burlingame Special Collections)

In 1963 the FBI sent several agents to St. Augustine, Florida, to monitor the rapidly increasing racial tension there. Local civil rights leaders were demonstrating for the desegregation of all of St. Augustine's public facilities and were being met with hostile resistance from local white officials, business owners, and law enforcement officers. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference became involved in an effort to bring national media attention to the injustices in St. Augustine. Citing a hostile racial climate, King and other civil rights leaders compared the situation in St. Augustine to other hotbeds for racial tension in the South like Albany, Georgia and Birmingham, Alabama.

St. Augustine became an important battleground for civil rights. The exposure of racial inequality in the oldest city in the United States proved to be an effective way of drawing national attention to segregation in Florida's tourist oriented economy. Demonstrations in St. Augustine took place as debate over the Civil Rights Act raged in Washington, D.C.

For more information on the topic see: David R. Colburn, Racial Change and Community Crisis: St. Augustine, Florida, 1877-1980, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1991. Also: David J. Garrow, Centers of the Southern Struggle: FBI Files on Montgomery, Albany, St. Augustine, Selma, and Memphis, Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1988.

From the guide to the Federal Bureau of Investigation St. Augustine Surveillance Files, 1963-1967, (Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida)

The Southern Negro Youth Congress (1937-1949) was formed in 1937 in Richmond, Virginia by young African American communists and other young people. Prominent figures included James Jackson, Helen Gray, Esther Cooper, and Edward Strong. In 1939 the SNYC moved their headquarters from Richmond Birmingham. The SNYC had the support of prominent black adult leaders including Mary McCloud Bethune, Paul Robeson, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, A. Philip Randolph, and W.E.B. DuBois. Officers were elected to one year terms while the adult advisory board raised funds and offered advice.

The SNYC helped black tobacco workers organize a union in Richmond and it also organized anti-lynching campaigns across the South. Over the next twelve years SNYC formed chapters in ten southern states with a total membership of 11,000 at its peak. Over those years the organization encouraged southern blacks to join the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), helped register voters, and during World War II they testified before the Fair Employment Practices Committee describing employment discrimination in the South. SNYC members also sponsored the Caravan Puppeteers, a political puppet show, to explain how rural blacks could secure the right to vote, and published a newsletter Cavalcade .

Their activities also gained the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Tthe SNYC influenced a generation of African Americans, including Sallye Bell Davis (the mother of Angela Davis) and Julian Bond, Sr., to become political activists. The SNYC disbanded in 1949 as the political climate of the Cold War became increasingly hostile to radicalism.

From the guide to the Southern Negro Youth Congress: FBI Files, 1940-1981, undated, (Tamiment Library / Wagner Archives)

Gerhart Eisler (1897-1968) was a journalist and prominent communist activist in Austria, Germany, the United States, and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Born in Leipzig, Gerhard Eisler grew up in Vienna. He served in the First World War and returned from the Front radicalized. In 1918, with his sister, Ruth Fischer, and his brother, the leftist composer Hans Eisler, he was among the founders of the Austrian Communist Party. In 1920 or 1921 he moved to Germany and joined the German Communist Party (KPD). From 1929 to 1931 he was a liaison between the Communist International (Comintern) and the Communist Parties in China, and then from 1933 to 1935 its liason to the United States. The Comintern then sent Eisler to Spain during the Spanish Civil War to head a radio station broadcasting antifascist programming and publish a newspaper for volunteers serving in the International Brigades. From Spain he went to Paris and wrote articles for KPD publications to be distributed clandestinely in Nazi Germany. In 1939 he was interned by French authorities. After more than a year of imprisonment an offer of asylum to Spanish Civil War veterans by the Mexican government allowed him to be released and depart France. In 1941, Eisler and his companion, Brunhilde Rothstein (who later became his third wife), were on their way to Mexico when the ship on which they were traveling was torpedoed and British authorities interned them in Trinidad for some weeks. They were then allowed to continue to New York, but upon arrival were detained. Although granted transit privileges, they were not actually allowed to resume their trip, but were forced to stay on Ellis Island, as in the face of the advancing World War, the United States government had issued an order forbidding Germans or Austrians transit or exit visas to Latin American countries. After a determined campaign of several months by their friends, they were granted permission to enter the United States.

In the U.S. the Eislers lived in New York City and Gerhart Eisler worked as a journalist and helped found the anti-Nazi newspaper, The German-American . In 1946, as Eisler prepared to return to Germany, he was publicly accused of being an agent of the Soviet Union and his permission to leave the United States was rescinded. He and his wife and friends were subjected to intense surveillance by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and other federal agencies, and in February 1947 he was arrested for misrepresenting his Communist Party affiliation on his immigration application. Several days later he was summoned to testify at a hearing of the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). There he refused to be sworn in without first reading a statement and was charged with contempt of Congress. One of the witnesses at the hearing testifying against him was his sister, Ruth Fischer (the two had been estranged since 1933), who had become fiercely anti-Communist. Eisler was tried in two separate trials for both charges, and lost both. He was sentenced to one to three years in prison, but released on bond, while his cases were on appeal (the Supreme Court had agreed to consider his contempt charge). Shortly thereafter he was arrested by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in connection with deportation proceedings and held on Ellis Island for three months and was only released when he went on a hunger strike, putting him in the position of having the U.S. government attempting both to deport and detain him simultaneously. Eisler’s case became a celebrated one, for both the American right (an American Cold War film, I Was a Communist for the FBI, featured an actor portraying Eisler as a leading character, a villainous foreigner secretly heading the American Communist Party) as well as the left.

In May 1949, Eisler escaped by stowing away on a Polish liner bound for London. Once in England, although initially detained by the authorities, the British government allowed him to leave a month later. Eisler flew to the German Democratic Republic, where he joined his brother, Hans (who had been deported from the U.S. a year earlier also after refusing to cooperate with HUAC). Eisler remained in East Germany the rest of his life, continuing to work in radio and as a journalist.

From the guide to the Gerhart Eisler FOIA Files, Bulk, 1947-1951, circa 1941-1968, (Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive)

Born in Minden, Germany, on July 8, 1858, the anthropologist Franz Boas was the son of the merchant Meier Boas and his wife, Sophie Meyer. Raised in the radical and tradition of German Judaism, Franz's youth was steeped in politically liberal beliefs and a largely secular outlook that he carried with him from university through his emigration to the United States.

At the universities of Heidelberg and Bonn, Boas studied physics and geography before completing a doctorate in physical geography at Kiel in 1881. Intending on testing then-current theories of environmental determinism, he signed on to an anthropological expedition to Baffin Island in 1883-1884, expecting that he would document the close adaptative fit of Central Eskimo cultures to their extreme climate. His experiences in the arctic, however, led him to the contrary conclusion: that social traditions, not environmental, exerted a dominant influence over human societies, and from this point onward, he was led to pursue the cultural over than physical dimensions of humanity.

Although he returned to Berlin after the expedition, Boas emigrated to the United States in 1885 to assume an editorial position with the journal Science, hoping to use it as a stepping-stone to an academic appointment. In 1886, he embarked upon a second major field excursion into what would become his most famous ethnographic project, working among the Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka'wakw) Indians of the Northwest Coast, after which he secured his first academic position in 1889, at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. After three years at Clark and a failed appointment at the Field Museum in Chicago in 1892 (during which he played a part in organizing the anthropological exhibits for the Columbian World's Fair), Boas moved to New York City.

The restless activity of Boas's early years slowed in New York. Hired by the American Museum of Natural History (1895-1905), which became the recipient of the amazingly rich anthropological collections he accumulated on the Northwest Coast, Boas began to teach classes at Columbia University in 1896, where three years later he was appointed Professor of Anthropology. For the next 37 years, Boas ruled the anthropological roost at Columbia, accruing unprecedented power in his discipline, wielding grants, recommendations, and appointments with remarkable dexterity, and collecting about him a remarkable group of younger scholars as students and colleagues.

Distancing himself from some of the main currents of contemporary anthropological thought in the United States, and particularly from the evolutionist assumptions that riddled the discipline, Boas championed an anthropology that viewed human cultures as shaped more by historical "tradition" than biological propensity. Claiming to resist any overarching, synthetic theories of human relations, and particularly evolutionary theories of sociocultural development, Boas laid the theoretical groundwork for what became modern cultural relativism. In the process, he helped to clarify the demarcation between the concepts of culture and race and its expression in the divergence of the four fields in anthropology -- linguistics, ethnography, physical anthropology, and archaeology.

Boas's relatively few forays into physical anthropology included a pioneering anthropometric study in 1910-1911, demonstrating that the alleged mental and physical inferiority of immigrants disappeared statistically by the second generation. Opposed to immigration quotas and disdainful of the claims to science used to justify them, Boas was a consistent, strident opponent of racial determinism in intellect or behavior. A committed, politically active Socialist, he was frequently an outspoken critic of American policy. During the First World War, he spoke out against the treatment of German Americans and "enemy aliens" -- to the point of putting himself at risk -- and the rise of the Nazi party in Germany proved an even greater crusade. Despite his age, Boas took an active role in the anti-fascist struggle in the United States and was involved with numerous committees to assist refugee scholars. He was equally ardent in his efforts to criticize racial and ethnic bigotry in the United States.

As a mentor, Boas had a reputation of being directive, at times overbearing, and at the same time of doing too little to prepare his students for the rigors of fieldwork. The extraordinary number of students coming out of Columbia under his care, however, has arguably done as much to extend the Boasian approach than Boas's own writing. Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Elsie Clews Parsons, Alfred Kroeber, Frank Speck, Edward Sapir, Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Deloria, Melville Herskovits, Leslie Spier, Paul Radin, and Ashley Montagu are all students of Boas. Many continued in the same intellectual stream, some diverged, yet all bore traces of Boas's influence. He left a mark as well on the institutions of the discipline, as one of the founders of the American Anthropological Association and of the International Journal of American Linguistics .

From the guide to the Boas Family Papers, 1862-1942, (American Philosophical Society)