Scientists or Spies? The American Museum of Natural History in World War I Latin America, Roberta Marx Delson, 2026, Springer
It is easy to suspect that the motives of Henry Fairfield Osborn in putting scientists at the service of US intelligence during the first world war went beyond patriotic duty.
The president of the American Museum of Natural History was a co-founder of the American Eugenics Society and was widely known to have held racist and antisemitic views.
A prominent scientist who ran the AMNH from 1908 to 1933, Osborn believed the Nordic or Anglo-Saxon “race” to be superior and supported eugenics to preserve this genetic stock.
He contributed two prefaces, with enthusiasm, for different editions of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race—a book praised by Adolf Hitler and circulated widely among the Nazis.
Whether Osborn’s views explain his decision to put his researchers at the AMNH at the service of US national security priorities—a gross insult to scientific ethics—it cannot be denied that race was informing the context for his activities like never before.
As James E Wadsworth points out in his preface to Roberta Marx Delson’s history of this period, far from being a bit player during the European conflagration, Latin America was an important arena in the geopolitical chess game.
Indeed, the US was waging a covert war with Germany and eventually Japan, across the region between 1914 and 1918 fearing that these countries, tired of its imperial arrogance, would be natural allies of Washington’s enemies.
Several Latin American countries, especially Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, had large Italian and German populations with some Japanese communities, and Germany at least actively sought to recruit expatriates to the war effort.
Latin American countries dependent on exports were also angry at a trans-Atlantic blockade on trade caused by British naval activity, and there was considerable admiration within elites for Germanic military tradition, culture and politics.
Mexico in particular, had an axe to grind: the US was openly meddling in its revolutionary civil war, it had been just 50 years since Washington had forcefully seized half of its national territory in 1848, and several leaders or pretenders, from Huerta to Carranza, had distinct pro-German tendencies.
Moreover, the US would soon find itself reeling from the potential consequences, first, of the anonymous (and little known) 1915 Plan of San Diego, and thereafter of the Zimmerman proposition exposed through an intercepted telegram in 1917.
Both proposals put the agency of geopolitical change in the hands of races that the horrified US Anglo-Saxon elite, including such notables as Osborn, instinctively regarded as inferior.
The breathtaking implications of the Plan of San Diego—a proposal whose origin remains unclear that encouraged Latinos, African Americans and Asians in the southwest US to rise up and kill all Anglo-Americans—must have provoked tangible fear.
The proposition Arthur Zimmerman, Germany’s foreign secretary, offered Carranza to ally Mexico with Germany on the promise of the return of the territory lost to the US in 1848 was also genuinely tempting, and ultimately catapulted Washington into the war.
These racial fears would fuel a wholesale covert effort by the US to identify the potential for German and Japanese activity across Latin America as well as geo-diplomatic initiatives to keep the region at the very least neutral, but ideally on-side with the Allies.
Scientists or Spies explores the role attributed to scholars visiting Latin America within the emergent US spy infrastructure whereby academics with special linguistic skills often already working in the field—archaeologists, anthropologists, botanists, ornithologists and palaeontologists—enjoyed perfect covers to conduct espionage.
As such, this history raises intriguing questions about the relationship between science and politics everywhere, not least because these questions have lost none of their relevance today and, indeed, may be more pressing.
Delson puts them into relief from the outset through a quote in 1919 by the distinguished German-American anthropologist Franz Boas, who railed against the activities of scientists who had acted as agents of the US government during the war.
In a seminal essay, “Scientists as Spies”, Boas claimed angrily that “…[A] number of men who follow science as their profession, men whom I refuse to designate any longer as scientists, have prostituted science by using it as a cover for their activities as spies.”
Boas, she writes, “was not only correct when he exposed the non-scientific ventures of his academic colleagues, but he had sounded a pioneering warning of the dangers to intellectual integrity when science and politics crossed paths.”
It is of course an old issue, and Delson begins her study by examining how, long before the first world war, contacts between scientific colleagues in the Americas provided conduits through which to negotiate politics.
If relations declined after the Spanish-American War in 1898, which fuelled negative feelings toward US activities in the region, they were revived by champions of a “scientific” version of Pan-Americanism in the years just prior to the war.
Scientists affiliated with AMNH were particularly active in Latin America at this time, encouraged by Osborn, who was interested in pursuing fieldwork in the region because of his own evolutionary ideas but then, during the war, driven by an Überpatriotism.
It was with his “express approval” that AMNH personnel became deeply involved in covert intelligence gathering in Latin America even though, as the author suggests, he “should have known better than to authorise their service”.
Technically still on the institution’s payroll, but with salaries supplemented with government funds, Delson says these researchers were essentially “loaned” to the US government by the AMNH and assigned to surveillance activities in Latin America.
Delson examines case studies of museum personnel dispersed throughout Latin America during the war, where they served as government intelligence assets while trying (sometimes unsuccessfully) to fulfil their research obligations.
She writes that the list of such individuals “reads like a veritable ‘who’s who’ of natural history scientists of the period”, including Barnum Brown of dinosaur fame, who reported on petroleum reserves in Cuba; Frank Chapman, the distinguished ornithologist who served as an American Red Cross Commissioner in South America; George Cherrie, who reported from the Brazilian pantanales on what he deemed suspicious German activity; Herbert “Joe” Spinden, the anthropologist who gathered data on Central America; and Charles R Eastman, an ichthyologist who supplied information on Brazilian manganese shipments to Germany.
The principal target of Boas’ contempt had been the noted archaeologist Sylvanus Morley of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC, whose credible cover allowed him to engage in espionage in the Yucatan while appearing to investigate Mexican archaeology.
Delson writes that whatever one’s opinion of these “spying” activities, there is no denying that Boas’ revelation continues to draw attention to the ethical issues raised when science and politics overlap—as relevant now as they were 100 years ago.
The author points to efforts by the CIA to recruit her own husband, a palaeontologist who participated in a trip in 1975 to China as part of a group of US scientists following Nixon’s rapprochement with Beijing.
She also highlights more recently a decision by the American Anthropological Association in 2005 to create an ad hoc commission on the engagement of anthropology with the US security and intelligence communities.
While Delson has considered spying within the arena of natural history in an historical context, it is clearly rife today within the physical sciences.
This subject was the main focus of Daniel Golden’s Spy Schools: How the CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America’s Universitiesof 2017 which exposed the tactics used by US intelligence agencies to recruit and leverage scientists, including the staging of apparently bona fide conferences to lure overseas experts into their ambit.
Delson writes: “In truth, concerns over intellectual compromise as a result of scientists (or other academics) engaging in spying are as relevant and compelling today as they were a century ago: Plus ça change, plus c’est le même chose.”
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Categories: Central America, Mexico, South America, United States