Abstract
The “Baldwin Effect,” named after the turn-of-the-twentieth-century American psychologist James Mark Baldwin, has experienced a revival over the last few decades, driven primarily by some cognitive scientists who think it might be able to solve problems related to the evolution of consciousness. Baldwin’s own interests when he developed the theory, which he called “organic selection,” were somewhat different from those of modern cognitivists, and his social context was enormously different. This chapter aims to recover the social challenges of Baldwin’s time and explore how they might have been related to his proposal. Chief among these challenges was the widespread perception in the United States that the massive immigrant slums in New York and other cities posed a kind of existential threat to the American way of life. This perception, in turn, led to a number of radical and disturbing eugenic proposals for meeting the “immigrant problem.” It is suggested here that, although Baldwin did not address the immigrant issue directly, it was in his mind as he developed his theory of “organic selection,” and also that it offered a way out of the crisis that many Americans thought they then faced.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Exact figures vary somewhat from source to source. Two particularly accessible and reliable sources are the Ellis Island Foundation’s own timeline (http://bit.ly/3fYIo6) and the Fordham University website on New York City History (http://bit.ly/zJpFnb).
- 3.
See Camille Avena’s essay “Progressive education in New York City” on the Fordham University website on New York City history (http://bit.ly/oyGTs2).
- 4.
Cited in Ric Burns’ (1999) “New York: A Documentary Film,” Episode 4, 34:00 http://www.pbs.org/wnet/newyork/.
- 5.
Jordan himself did not take this to be a “just criticism,” however, because, essentially, whatever is true is true, whether it lead to despair or no. He also noted that Osborn was predicting the rapid decline of Weismann’s influence in 1892. Of course, it was Osborn’s Lamarckism that rapidly declined, and Osborn himself became a eugenicist before long.
- 6.
It is easy to become distracted by the inclusion of the term “ethical” in the title of the second book, but the matter is explained in Baldwin’s autobiography (Baldwin 1926, 66–67). Essentially he added the term to the title at the last minute in order to make it more appealing to the Danish Royal Academy of Sciences awards committee. Originally the book was subtitled just “A Study in Social Psychology.”
- 7.
See Wozniak (2009) for a detailed account of the professional disaster that befell Baldwin in the wake of his arrest and resignation.
- 8.
There is little reason to believe that Baldwin’s writings had much to do with that decision. Baldwin and Woodrow Wilson had despised each other when, respectively, professor and president at Princeton. Indeed, Wilson’s high-handedness is one of the reasons Baldwin cites for having left Princeton for Hopkins in 1905. It was the “Zimmerman telegram” from Germany, urging Mexico to attack the US in exchange for a return of New Mexico and Arizona after the war that prompted Wilson to act in 1917. Incidentally, a ship on which Baldwin and his family were travelling across the English Channel, the Sussex, was torpedoed and sunk during WWI. One of his daughters was seriously wounded in the attack. A young Wilder Penfield, who would later become a leading neuroscientist in Montréal, was on the same ship, and became acquainted with the Baldwin family there.
- 9.
Though, see Baldwin’s (1902, 144–148) comments on “Social Progress.”
- 10.
Thanks to Robert Wozniak for directing me to this passage. He believes that by ‘superstition,’ Baldwin probably meant Catholicism and, if so, then he probably felt the same way about the Irish and German immigrants of the mid-nineteenth century, and the Italian immigrants of the late nineteenth as well.
- 11.
Dewey (1898) published a review of Baldwin’s Social and Ethical Interpretations, but it did not touch on the present issues either, focusing mainly on what Dewey took to be a certain theoretical confusion in Baldwin’s view between the process of developing a conscious self and the specific contents of that consciousness.
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Green, C.D. (2014). James Mark Baldwin, the Baldwin Effect, Organic Selection, and the American “Immigrant Crisis” at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. In: Barker, G., Desjardins, E., Pearce, T. (eds) Entangled Life. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7067-6_3
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