Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace yesterday denounced Nazi racialism as “pure scientific faking” in a nationally broadcast address at the key meeting of a nation-wide series of 27 Lincoln’s Birthday rallies under the auspices of a committee of 28 prominent scientists to fight intolerance and threats to intellectual freedom.
Declaring that the term “Aryan” as used by scientists meant the people of the Caucasian race speaking an Indo-European language, Mr. Wallace declared before a large crowd at the Hotel Waldorf Astoria that Jews were as much “Aryans” as Germans. “The dictator’s misuse of the word Aryan is pure scientific faking,” he declared.
Men “who call themselves scientists have been willing to play the game of the dictators by twisting science into a mumbo-jumbo of dangerous nonsense,” Mr. Wallace asserted. “These men are furnishing pseudo-scientific support for the exaltation of one race and one nation as conquerors.”
He urged a rededication “to making it possible for those who are gifted in art, science and religion to approach the unknown with true reverence, and not under the compulsion of producing immediate results for the glorification of one man, one group, one race or one nation.” The address was entitled “Racial Theories and the Genetic Basis for Democracy.”
Prof. Franz Boas, chairman of the Lincoln’s Birthday Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, which sponsored the meetings, promised that “we shall create an organization to strengthen democracy” and said “steps have been taken which shall lead to the realization of this end.” Other speakers were Prof. Harold C. Urey, Jan Masaryk, former Czechoslovak Minister to Britain; Ordway Tead, of the Board of Higher Education, and Prof. Clyde Miller, head of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis.
The need for active cooperation between scientists and the public to defend scientific freedom and political democracy was stressed in a preliminary broadcast Saturday night in which Senator Lewis B. Schwellenbach and Professors Urey, Boas, Robert S. Lynd and Walter B. Cannon, president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, participated.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
