When Boas was hired away by the archaeologist and anthropologist Frederic Ward Putnam to help put together the ethnology and archaeology gallery at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, he had high hopes of sharing his preoccupations more widely. In fact, his work brought neither crowds nor permanent employment in Chicago. Then Putnam was hired as a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, and in 1895 he brought Boas with him. The next year, Boas started teaching at Columbia. Finally, in 1899, the university offered him a professorship in the new department of anthropology and put him in charge of its Ph.D. program. (Uncle Jacobi quietly arranged to underwrite his salary; you may notice a pattern here.) Boas was now poised, institutionally, to create a distinctly American school of anthropology.
That school is most easily defined by what it wasn’t, the way a clan may be defined by its taboos. Boas favored induction, by which he meant an attention to particulars that wouldn’t be deformed by grand theories. He was skeptical, in particular, about doctrines of racial superiority. He had, more slowly, become a skeptic of social evolutionism: the notion that peoples progress through stages (in one crude formulation, from savagery to barbarism to civilization), each of which could be distinguished by certain shared characteristics. He was vigilant, too, concerning ethnocentrism. “Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, good manners, and ethical standards is not universal,” he later wrote.
These tenets, in combination, made him a potent leveler in an age of racialized hierarchy. In 1906 W.E.B. Du Bois invited him to give a commencement speech at the black institution where he taught, Atlanta University. Boas told the students of Africa’s contributions to civilization. “I wish you could see the scepters of African kings, carved of hard wood and representing artistic forms,” he said, assuring them that the bronzes of Benin “have so far excelled in technique any European work, that they are even now almost inimitable.” Du Bois, a decade his junior, later recalled his own reaction: “I was too astonished to speak. All of this I had never heard and I came then and afterwards to realize how the silence and neglect of science can let truth utterly disappear.”