A Problematic Alliance: Colonial Anthropology, Recapitulation Theory, And G. Stanley Hall's Program for the Liberation of America's Youth (Article 10) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Recent studies of G. Stanley Hall's opus, Adolescence: Its Psychology And Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (1904), have highlighted one of the book's most problematic implications: if young people were thought to be the developmental analogues of "primitive" or "savage," then the treatment of young people might be "influenced by colonialist discourse, with its racist and evolutionist bases" (Lesko 1996). As Stephen Jay Gould has written, the theory of recapitulation--which rendered young people and members of the "lower races" evolutionary equivalents--provided "an arsenal of racist arguments supplied by science to justify slavery and imperialism" (Gould 1977, 126). Recapitulation was central to Hall's work, and virtually no theme in Adolescence was explored without its application. This prompts a troubling question: If Hall's work on child development was based on a racial theory that legitimized the oppression of colonized peoples, did it also justify the subjugation of young people? (1) If so, this was clearly not Hall's intent. Instead, Adolescence was published in an effort to liberate young people from conditions that he likened to those faced by colonial peoples. Rather than seeing Hall as one of the most important (and radical) advocates of children's rights, however, historians have generally written him off as a mystical crackpot (Kliebard 1995, 38). Many historians hold Hall in contempt because of his heavy reliance on various incarnations of racist science that dominated nineteenth-century thought (Ewen and Ewen 2006; Haller 1971). Clarence Karier, for instance, wrote that "Hall, with almost uncanny prophetic vision, blueprinted National Socialism at least a decade before it was realized in Germany" (Karier 1967, 156). Joseph M. Hawes suggested that Hall's use of Cesare Lombroso's work, which situated criminal anthropology along racial lines, "inspired the first American efforts to apply the teachings and techniques of criminal anthropology to juvenile delinquents (Hawes 1971, 208). Jeffrey Moran, meanwhile, cites Hall's ideas about adolescent sexuality as contributing to the development of repressive and authoritarian sex education programs by social hygienists, who "energized G. Stanley Hall's definition of adolescence and created a wider public concern over youth." These ideas, which were based on notions of "savage" and "civilized" sexual behaviors and appetites, contributed to a "connection between adolescence and social decline that would remain in many people's minds for decades to come" (Moran 2000, 62--63). Finally, Joseph Kett, who takes a more nuanced view of Hall than do the previously cited authors, noted that Hall "accepted many of the postulates of social Darwinism and wrote scathingly about the weak and unfit." Kett, however, who does find within Hall's work an entrenched middle--class bias, does not see Hall's contributions as particularly original, since most of his ideas "were just a culmination of concepts that had flourished in less systematic form for much of the 19th century" (Kett 1977, 220).