2018-02-23 18:58:03 +00:00
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created_at: '2013-11-12T20:13:43.000Z'
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title: The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal (1995)
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url: http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/15/magazine/the-great-ivy-league-nude-posture-photo-scandal.html?pagewanted=all
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author: kitcar
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points: 137
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story_text: ''
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comment_text:
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num_comments: 71
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story_id:
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story_title:
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story_url:
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parent_id:
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created_at_i: 1384287223
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_tags:
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- story
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- author_kitcar
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- story_6720621
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objectID: '6720621'
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2018-06-08 12:05:27 +00:00
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year: 1995
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2018-02-23 18:58:03 +00:00
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---
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2018-03-03 09:35:28 +00:00
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ONE AFTERNOON IN THE LATE 1970's, deep in the labyrinthine interior of a
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massive Gothic tower in New Haven, an unsuspecting employee of Yale
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University opened a long-locked room in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium and
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stumbled upon something shocking and disturbing.
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Shocking, because what he found was an enormous cache of nude
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photographs, thousands and thousands of photographs of young men in
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front, side and rear poses. Disturbing, because on closer inspection the
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photos looked like the record of a bizarre body-piercing ritual:
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sticking out from the spine of each and every body was a row of sharp
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metal pins.
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The employee who found them was mystified. The athletic director at the
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time, Frank Ryan, a former Cleveland Browns quarterback new to Yale, was
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mystified. But after making some discreet inquiries, he found out what
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they were -- and took swift action to burn them. He called in a
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professional, a document-disposal expert, who initiated a two-step
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torching procedure. First, every single one of the many thousands of
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photographs was fed into a shredder, and then each of the shreds was fed
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to the flames, thereby insuring that not a single intact or recognizable
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image of the nude Yale students -- some of whom had gone on to assume
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positions of importance in government and society -- would survive.
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It was the Bonfire of the Best and the Brightest, and the assumption was
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that the last embarrassing reminders of a peculiar practice, which
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masqueraded as science and now looked like a kind of kinky voodoo
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ritual, had gone up in smoke. The assumption was wrong. Thousands upon
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thousands of photos from Yale and other elite schools survive to this
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day.
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When I first embarked on my quest for the lost nude "posture photos," I
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could not decide whether to think of the phenomenon as a scandal or as
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an extreme example of academic folly -- of what happens when
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well-intentioned institutions allow their reverence for the reigning
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conjectures of scientific orthodoxy to persuade them to do things that
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seem silly or scandalous in retrospect. And now that I've found them,
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I'm still not sure whether outrage or laughter is the more appropriate
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reaction. Your response, dear reader, may depend on whether your nude
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photograph is among them. And if you attended Yale, Mount Holyoke,
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Vassar, Smith or Princeton -- to name a few of the schools involved --
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from the 1940's through the 1960's, there's a chance that yours may be.
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Your response may also depend on how you feel about the fact that some
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of these schools made nude or seminude photographs of you available to
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the disciples of what many now regard as a pseudo-science without asking
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permission. And on how you feel about an obscure archive in Washington
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making them available for researchers to study.
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While investigating the strange odyssey of the missing nude "posture
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photos," I found that the issue is, in every respect, a very touchy
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matter -- indeed, a kind of touchstone for registering the uneven
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evolution of attitudes toward body, race and gender in the past
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half-century. UP YOUR LEGS FOR YALE
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I personally have posed nude only twice in my life. The second time --
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for a John and Yoko film titled "Up Your Legs Forever," which has been
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screened at the Whitney -- I was one of many, it was Art, and let's
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leave it at that. But the first time was even more strange and bizarre
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because of its strait-laced Ivy setting, its preliberation context --
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and yes, because of the metal pins stuck on my body.
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One fall afternoon in the mid-60's, shortly after I arrived in New Haven
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to begin my freshman year at Yale, I was summoned to that sooty Gothic
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shrine to muscular virtue known as Payne Whitney Gym. I reported to a
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windowless room on an upper floor, where men dressed in crisp white
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garments instructed me to remove all of my clothes. And then -- and this
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is the part I still have trouble believing -- they attached metal pins
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to my spine. There was no actual piercing of skin, only of dignity, as
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four-inch metal pins were affixed with adhesive to my vertebrae at
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regular intervals from my neck down. I was positioned against a wall; a
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floodlight illuminated my pin-spiked profile and a camera captured it.
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It didn't occur to me to object: I'd been told that this "posture photo"
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was a routine feature of freshman orientation week. Those whose pins
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described a too violent or erratic postural curve were required to
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attend remedial posture classes.
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The procedure did seem strange. But I soon learned that it was a
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long-established custom at most Ivy League and Seven Sisters schools.
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George Bush, George Pataki, Brandon Tartikoff and Bob Woodward were
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required to do it at Yale. At Vassar, Meryl Streep; at Mount Holyoke,
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Wendy Wasserstein; at Wellesley, Hillary Rodham and Diane Sawyer. All of
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them -- whole generations of the cultural elite -- were asked to pose.
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But however much the colleges tried to make this bizarre procedure seem
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routine, its undeniable strangeness engendered a scurrilous strain of
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folklore. THE MISMEASURE OF MAN
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There were several salacious stories circulating at Yale back in the
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60's. Most common was the report that someone had broken into a photo
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lab in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and stolen the negatives of that year's
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Vassar posture nudes, which were supposedly for sale on the Ivy League
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black market or available to the initiates of Skull and Bones. Little
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did I know how universal this myth was.
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"Ah, yes, the famous rumored stolen Vassar posture pictures," Nora
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Ephron (Wellesley '62) recalled when I spoke with her. "But don't forget
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the famous rumored stolen Wellesley posture photos."
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"Wellesley too?"
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"Oh, yes," she said. "It's one of those urban legends."
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She can laugh about it now, she said, but in retrospect the whole idea
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that she and all her smart classmates went along with being photographed
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in this way dismays her. "We were idiots," she said. "Idiots\!"
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Sally Quinn (Smith '63), the Washington writer, expressed alarm when I
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first reached her. "God, I'm relieved," she said. "I thought you were
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going to tell me you found mine. You always thought when you did it that
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one day they'd come back to haunt you. That 25 years later, when your
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husband was running for President, they'd show up in Penthouse."
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Another Wellesley alumna, Judith Martin, author of the Miss Manners
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column, told me she's "appalled in retrospect" that the college forced
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this practice on their freshmen. "Why weren't we more appalled at the
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time?" she wondered. Nonetheless, she confessed to making a kind of
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good-natured extortionate use of the posture-photo specter herself.
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"I do remember making a reunion speech in which I offered to sell them
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back to people for large donations. And there were a lot of people who
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turned pale before they realized it was a joke."
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Distinguishing between joke and reality is often difficult in
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posture-photo lore. Consider the astonishing rumor Ephron clued me in
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to, a story she assured me she'd heard from someone very close to the
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source:
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"There was a guy, an adjunct professor of sociology who was working on a
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grant for the tobacco industry. And what I heard when I was at Wellesley
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was that, using Harvard posture photos, he had proved conclusively that
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the more manly you are, the more you smoked. And I believe the criterion
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for manliness was the obvious one."
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"The obvious one?"
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"I assume -- what else could it have been?"
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In fact, the study was real. I was able to track it down, although the
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conclusion it reached about Harvard men was somewhat different from what
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Ephron recalled. But, clearly, the nude-posture-photo practice
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engendered heated fantasies in both sexes. Perhaps in the otherwise
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circumspect Ivy League-Seven Sisters world, nude posture photos were the
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licensed exception to propriety that spawned licentious fantasies.
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Fantasies that were to lie unremembered, or at least unpublicized until.
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. . . THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED
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It was Naomi Wolf, author of "The Beauty Myth," who opened the Pandora's
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box of posture-photo controversy. In that book and in a 1992 Op-Ed piece
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in The Times, Wolf (Yale '84) bitterly attacked Dick Cavett (Yale '55)
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for a joke he'd made at Wolf's graduation ceremonies. According to Wolf,
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who'd never had a posture photo taken (the practice was discontinued at
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Yale in 1968), Cavett took the microphone and told the following
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anecdote:
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"When I was an undergraduate . . . there were no women \[ at Yale \] .
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The women went to Vassar. At Vassar they had nude photographs taken of
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women in gym class to check their posture. One year the photos were
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stolen and turned up for sale in New Haven's red-light district." His
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punchline: "The photos found no buyers."
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Wolf was horrified. Cavett, she wrote in her book, "transposed us for a
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moment out of the gentle quadrangle where we had been led to believe we
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were cherished, and into the tawdry district four blocks away, where
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stolen photographs of our naked bodies would find no buyers."
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Cavett responded, in a letter to The Times, by dismissing the joke as an
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innocuous "example of how my Yale years showed up in my long-forgotten
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nightclub act."
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Wolf's horrified account attests to the totemic power of the
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posture-photo legend. But little did she know, little did Cavett know,
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how potentially sinister the entire phenomenon really was. No one knew
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until. . . . THE NAZI-POSTURE-PHOTO ALLEGATION
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This is where things get really strange. Shortly after Cavett's reply,
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George Hersey, a respected art history professor at Yale, wrote a letter
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to The Times that ran under the headline "A Secret Lies Hidden in Vassar
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and Yale Nude 'Posture Photos.' " Sounding an ominous note, Hersey
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declared that the photos "had nothing to do with posture . . . that is
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only what we were told."
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Hersey went on to say that the pictures were actually made for
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anthropological research: "The reigning school of the time, presided
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over by E. A. Hooton of Harvard and W. H. Sheldon" -- who directed an
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institute for physique studies at Columbia University -- "held that a
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person's body, measured and analyzed, could tell much about
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intelligence, temperament, moral worth and probable future achievement.
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The inspiration came from the founder of social Darwinism, Francis
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Galton, who proposed such a photo archive for the British population."
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And then Hersey evoked the specter of the Third Reich:
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"The Nazis compiled similar archives analyzing the photos for racial as
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well as characterological content (as did Hooton). . . . The Nazis often
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used American high school yearbook photographs for this purpose. . . .
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The American investigators planned an archive that could correlate each
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freshman's bodily configuration ('somatotype') and physiognomy with
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later life history. That the photos had no value as pornography is a
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tribute to their resolutely scientific nature."
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A truly breathtaking missive. What Hersey seemed to be saying was that
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entire generations of America's ruling class had been unwitting guinea
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pigs in a vast eugenic experiment run by scientists with a master-race
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hidden agenda. My classmate Steve Weisman, the Times editor who first
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called my attention to the letter, pointed out a fascinating corollary:
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The letter managed in a stroke to confer on some of the most
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overprivileged people in the world the one status distinction it seemed
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they'd forever be denied -- victim.
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My first stop in what would turn out to be a prolonged and eventful
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quest for the truth about the posture photos was Professor Hersey's
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office in New Haven. A thoughtful, civilized scholar, Hersey did not
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seem prone to sensationalism. But he showed me a draft chapter from his
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forthcoming book on the esthetics of racism that went even further than
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the allegations in his letter to The Times. I was struck by one passage
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in particular:
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"From the outset, the purpose of these 'posture photographs' was
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eugenic. The data accumulated, says Hooton, will eventually lead on to
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proposals to 'control and limit the production of inferior and useless
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organisms.' Some of the latter would be penalized for reproducing . . .
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or would be sterilized. But the real solution is to be enforced better
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breeding -- getting those Exeter and Harvard men together with their
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corresponding Wellesley, Vassar and Radcliffe girls."
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In other words, a kind of eugenic dating service, "Studs" for the
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cultural elite. But my talk with Hersey left key questions unanswered.
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What was the precise relationship between theorists like Hooton and
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Sheldon (the man who actually took tens of thousands of those nude
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posture photos) and the Ivy League and Seven Sisters schools whose
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student bodies were photographed? Were the schools complicit or were
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they simply dupes? And finally: What became of the photographs?
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As for the last question, Hersey thought there'd be no trouble locating
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the photographs. He assumed that "they can probably be found with
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Sheldon's research papers" in one of the several academic institutions
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with which he had been associated. But most of those institutions said
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that they had burned whatever photos they'd had. Harley P. Holden,
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curator of Harvard's archives, said that from the 1880's to the 1940's
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the university had its own posture-photo program in which some 3,500
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pictures of its students were taken. Most were destroyed 15 or 20 years
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ago "for privacy scruples," Holden said. Nonetheless, quite a few
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Harvard nudes can be found illustrating Sheldon's book on body types,
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the "Atlas of Men." Radcliffe took posture photos from 1931 to 1961; the
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curator there said that most of them had been destroyed (although some
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might be missing) and that none were taken by Sheldon.
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Hersey insisted that there was a treasure trove of Sheldon photographs
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out there to be found. He gave me the phone number of a man in New
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Mexico named Ellery Lanier, a friend of Sheldon, the posture-photo
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mastermind. "He might know where they ended up," Hersey told me.
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Going from Hersey to Lanier meant stepping over the threshold from
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contemporary academic orthodoxy into the more exotic precincts of
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Sheldon subculture, a loose-knit network of his surviving disciples. A
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number of them keep the Sheldon legacy alive, hoping for a revival.
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Lanier, an articulate, seventyish doctoral student at New Mexico State,
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told me he'd gotten to know Sheldon at Columbia in the late 1940's, when
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the two of them were hanging out with Aldous Huxley and Christopher
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Isherwood and their crew. (Sheldon had a prophetic mystical side, which
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revealed itself in Huxleian philosophic treatises on the "Promethean
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will." Sheldon was also, Lanier told me, "the world's leading expert on
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the history of the American penny.") At that time, Sheldon was at the
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apex of his now-forgotten renown. Life magazine ran a cover story in
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1951 on Sheldon's theory of somatotypes.
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While the popular conception of Sheldonism has it that he divided human
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beings into three types -- skinny, nervous "ectomorphs"; fat and jolly
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"endomorphs"; confident, buffed "mesomorphs" -- what he actually did was
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somewhat more complex. He believed that every individual harbored within
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him different degrees of each of the three character components. By
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using body measurements and ratios derived from nude photographs,
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Sheldon believed he could assign every individual a three-digit number
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representing the three components, components that Sheldon believed were
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inborn -- genetic -- and remained unwavering determinants of character
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regardless of transitory weight change. In other words, physique equals
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destiny.
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It was the pop-psych flavor of the month for a while; Cosmopolitan
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magazine published quizzes about how to understand your husband on the
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basis of somatotype. Ecto-, meso- and endomorphic have entered the
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language, although few scientists these days give credence to Sheldon's
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claims. "Half the textbooks in \[ his \] area fail to take \[ him \]
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seriously," remarked one academician in a 1992 paper on Sheldon's
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legacy. Others, like Hans Eysenck, the British psychologist, have
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suggested that Sheldon wasn't really doing science at all, that he was
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just winging it, that there was "little theoretical foundation for the
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observed findings."
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Nonetheless, in the late 40's and early 50's, Sheldonism seemed
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mainstream, and Sheldon took advantage of that to approach Ivy League
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schools. Many, like Harvard, already had a posture-photo tradition. But
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it was at Wellesley College in the late 1920's that concern about
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postural correctness metamorphosed into a cottage industry with
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pretensions to science. The department of hygiene circulated training
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films about posture measurement to other women's colleges, which took up
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the practice, as did some "progressive" high schools and elementary
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schools. (By the time Hillary Rodham arrived on the Wellesley campus,
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women were allowed to have their pictures taken only partly nude.
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Although Lanier assumes that Sheldon took the Rodham photo, Wellesley
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archivists believe that Sheldon didn't take posture photos at their
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school.)
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What Sheldon did was appropriate the ritual. Lanier confirmed that the
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Ivy League "posture photos" Sheldon used were "part of a facade or
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cover-up for what we were really doing" -- which would make the schools
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less complicit. But Lanier stoutly defended "what we were really doing"
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as valid science. As part of his Ph.D. project, he has been examining
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Sheldonian ecto-, meso- and endomorphic categories and the "time
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horizon" of the individual.
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"Conflicting temporal horizon can account for all the divorce we have
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today," Lanier said. "The Woody Allen-Mia Farrow-type thing."
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Huh? Woody and Mia?
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"I'm trying to find some clue to the breakup because of the
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discrepancies between their time focus," Lanier said.
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"Well, Woody's certainly ectomorphic, but. . . . "
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"No, let me correct you," Lanier said tartly. "Woody Allen creates an
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illusion. He puts on a big show of being ectomorphic, but this is all a
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cover-up because he's quite mesomorphic."
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"I think he would be surprised to hear that."
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"I know," Lanier said. "He wouldn't want to admit it, but the only way
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you can know this is by looking at photographs very carefully."
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Lanier also filled me in on the cause of Sheldon's downfall: his never
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completed, partly burned "Atlas of Women." In attempting to compile what
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would have been the companion volume to his "Atlas of Men," which
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included hundreds of nude Harvard men to illustrate each of the
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three-digit body types, Sheldon made the strategic mistake of taking his
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photo show on the road.
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What happened was this: In September 1950, Sheldon and his team
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descended on Seattle, where the University of Washington had agreed to
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play host to his project. He'd begun taking nude pictures of female
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freshmen, but something went wrong. One of them told her parents about
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the practice. The next morning, a battalion of lawyers and university
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officials stormed Sheldon's lab, seized every photo of a nude woman,
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convicted the images of shamefulness and sentenced them to burning. The
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angry crew then shoveled the incendiary film into an incinerator. A
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short-lived controversy broke out: Was this a book burning? A witch
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hunt? Was Professor Sheldon's nude photography a legitimate scientific
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investigation into the relationship between physique and temperament,
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the raw material of serious scholarship? Or just raw material --
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pornography masquerading as science?
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They burned a few thousand photos in Seattle. Thousands more were burned
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at Harvard, Vassar and Yale in the 60's and 70's, when the colleges
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phased out the posture-photo practice. But thousands more escaped the
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flames, tens of thousands that Sheldon took at Harvard, Vassar, Yale and
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elsewhere but sequestered in his own archives. And what became of the
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archives? Lanier didn't know, but he said they were out there somewhere.
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He dug up the phone number of a man who was once the lawyer for
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Sheldon's estate, a Mr. Joachim Weissfeld in Providence, R.I. "Maybe
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he'll know," Lanier said.
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At this point, the posture-photo quest turned into a kind of high-speed
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parody of "The Aspern Papers." The lawyer in Rhode Island professed
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ignorance as to the whereabouts or even continued existence of the lost
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Sheldonian archives, but he did put me in touch with the last living
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leaf on the Sheldon family tree, a niece by marriage who lived in
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Warwick, R.I. She, too, said she didn't know what had become of the
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Sheldon photos, but she did give me the name of an 84-year-old man
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living in Columbus, Ohio, who had worked very closely with Sheldon, one
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Roland D. Elderkin -- a man who, in fact, had shot many of the lost
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photos himself and who promised to reveal their location to me. THE
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MYSTERY SOLVED
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With Roland D. Elderkin, we're now this close to the late, great Sheldon
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himself. "There was nobody closer," Elderkin declared shortly after I
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reached him at his rooming house in Columbus. "I was his soul mate."
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Elderkin described himself a bit mournfully as "just an 84-year-old man
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living alone in a furnished room." But he once had a brush with
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greatness, and you can hear it in his recollection of Sheldon and his
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grand project.
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To Elderkin, Sheldon was no mere body-typer: he was a true philosophe,
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"the first to introduce holistic perspective" to American science, a
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proto-New Ager. Elderkin became Sheldon's research associate, his trusty
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cameraman and a kind of private eye, compiling case histories of
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Sheldon's posture nudes to confirm Sheldon's theories about physique and
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destiny. He also witnessed Sheldon's downfall.
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The Bonfire of the Nude Coed Photos in Seattle wasn't Sheldon's only
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public burning, Elderkin told me: "He went through a number of furors
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over women. A similar thing later happened at Pembroke, the women's
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college at Brown." In each case, the fact that female nudes were
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involved kindled the flame against Sheldon. Toward the end, Sheldon
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became a kind of pathetic Willy Loman-esque figure as he wandered
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America far from the elite Ivy halls that had once housed him, seeking a
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place he could complete the photography for his "Atlas of Women."
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Rejected and scorned, out of fashion with academic officialdom, Sheldon
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is still a hero to Roland D. Elderkin. And so when Sheldon died in 1977,
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"a lonely old man who did nothing his last years but sit in his room and
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read detective stories," Elderkin said, "there was nobody else to carry
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on." It fell to Elderkin to find a final resting place for the huge
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archives of Sheldon's posture nudes.
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It wasn't easy, he said. Elderkin went "up and down the East Coast
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trying to peddle them" to places like Harvard and Columbia, which once
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welcomed Sheldon but now wanted nothing to do with nude photos and the
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controversy trailing them. "That's how I found out about the burning at
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Pembroke," Elderkin recalled. "I was trying to get someone at Brown to
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accept them, and he said, 'That filth? We already burned the ones we
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had.' "
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"And you know where they are now?" I asked incredulously. "Hersey and
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Lanier said they didn't know."
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"Sure I do," he said. "I was the one that finally found a home for
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them."
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And then he told me where.
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BEFORE WE PROCEED TO the location of the treasure itself, it might be
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wise to pause and ponder the wisdom of opening such a Pandora's box.
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With scholars like Hersey alleging eugenic motives behind Sheldon's
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project, with the self-images of so many of the cultural elite at stake,
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would exposure of the hidden hoard be defensible? Is there anyone, aside
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from lifelong Sheldon disciples, who will step forward to defend
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Sheldon's posture photos?
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Of course there is: Camille Paglia.
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"I'm very interested in somatotypes," she said. "I constantly use the
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term in my work. The word 'ectomorph' is used repeatedly in 'Sexual
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Personae' about Spenser's Apollonian angels. That's one of the things
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I'm trying to do: to reconsider these classification schemes, to rescue
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them from their tainting by Nazi ideology. It's always been a part of
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classicism. It's sort of like we've lost the old curiosity about
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physical characteristics, physical differences. And I maintain it's
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bourgeois prudery.
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"See, I'm interested in looking at women's breasts\! I'm interested in
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looking at men's penises\! I maintain that at the present date,
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Penthouse, Playboy, Hustler, serve the same cultural functions as the
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posture photos."
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With these words ringing in my ears, I set out to see if I could open up
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the Sheldon archives. THE SECRET IS BARED
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Down a dimly lit back corridor of the National Museum of Natural History
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in Washington, far from the dinosaur displays, is a branch of the
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Smithsonian not well known to the public: the National Anthropological
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|
Archives.
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Although it contains a rich and strange assortment of archival
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|
treasures, it's particularly notable for the number of Native Americans
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|
who travel here to investigate centuries-old anthropological records,
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|
poring over them in a cramped, windowless research room whose walls are
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hung with stylized illustrations of tribal rituals painted by one Chief
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Blue Eagle. It was here that my quest for another kind of tribal
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illustration -- the taboo images of the blue-blood tribe, the long-lost
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nude posture photos -- culminated at last.
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In 1987, the curators of the National Anthropological Archives acquired
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the remains of Sheldon's life work, which were gathering dust in "dead
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storage" in a Goodwill warehouse in Boston. While there were solid
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archival reasons for making the acquisition, the curators are clearly
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|
aware that they harbor some potentially explosive material in their
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storage rooms. And they did not make it easy for me to gain access.
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On my first visit, I was informed by a good-natured but wary supervisor
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that the restrictive grant of Sheldon's materials by his estate would
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permit me to review only the written materials in the Sheldon archives.
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The actual photographs, he said, were off-limits. To see them, I would
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have to petition the chief of archivists. Determined to pursue the
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matter to the bitter end, I began the process of applying for
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permission.
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Meanwhile, I plunged into the written material hoping to find answers to
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|
several unresolved mysteries. Although I did not find substantiation in
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those files for Hersey's belief that Sheldon was actively engaged in a
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master-race eugenic project, I did find stunning confirmation of
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Hersey's charge that Sheldon held racist views.
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In Box 43 I came across a document never referred to in any of the
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literature on Sheldon I'd seen. It was a faded offprint of a 1924
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Sheldon study, "The Intelligence of Mexican Children." In it are damning
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|
assertions presented as scientific truisms that "Negro intelligence"
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|
comes to a "standstill at about the 10th year," Mexican at about age 12.
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|
To the author of such sentiments, America's elite institutions entrusted
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their student bodies.
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Another box held clues to the truth behind Nora Ephron's tale about
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|
smoking and organ size. It turned out to be true that a research arm of
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|
the tobacco industry had sponsored studies on the relationship between
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|
masculinity and smoking, and that the studies had involved Sheldonian
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posture photos of Harvard men -- although there is no evidence that the
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criterion of masculinity was the "obvious one" referred to by Ephron. I
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|
|
located a fascinating report on this research in a December 1959 issue
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|
of the respected journal Science, a report titled "Masculinity and
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|
Smoking." According to the article, and contrary to the rumor, it is
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|
"not strength but weakness of the masculine component" that is "more
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|
frequent in the heavier smokers." Here, perhaps, is the most profound
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|
cultural legacy of the Sheldonian posture-photo phenomenon: the
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|
blueprint for the sexual iconography of tobacco advertising. If, in
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|
fact, heavy smokers looked more like Harvard nerds than Marlboro men,
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|
why not use advertising imagery to make Harvard nerds feel like virile
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|
cowboys when they smoked?
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|
Finally and most telling, I found a letter nearly four decades old that
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did something nothing else in the files did. It gave a glimpse, a clue
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|
to the feelings of the subjects of Sheldon's research, particularly the
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|
women. I found the letter in a file of correspondence between Sheldon
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and various phys ed directors at women's colleges who were providing
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Sheldon with bodies for the ill-fated "Atlas of Women." In this letter,
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|
an official at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, was responding to
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Sheldon's request to rephotograph the female freshmen he had
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|
photographed the year before. Something had apparently gone wrong with
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the technical side of the earlier shoot. But the official refused to
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allow Sheldon to reshoot the women, declaring that "to require them to
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pose for another \[ nude posture photo \] would create insurmountable
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|
psychological problems."
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Insurmountable psychological problems. Suddenly the subjects of
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Sheldon's photography leaped into the foreground: the shy girl, the fat
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girl, the religiously conservative, the victim of inappropriate parental
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|
attention. Here, perhaps, Naomi Wolf has a point. In a culture that
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|
already encourages women to scrutinize their bodies critically, the
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|
first thing that happens to these women when they arrive at college is
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|
an intrusive, uncomfortable, public examination of their nude bodies.
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THREE MONTHS LATER, I FINALLY SUCCEEDED IN gaining permission to study
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|
the elusive posture photos. As I sat at my desk in the reading room,
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|
under a portrait of Chief Blue Eagle, the long-sought cache
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|
materialized. A curator trundled in a library cart from the storage
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|
|
facility. Teetering on top of the cart were stacks of big, gray
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|
|
cardboard boxes. The curator handed me a pair of the white cotton gloves
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|
that researchers must use to handle archival material.
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The contents of the boxes were described in an accompanying "Finder's
|
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|
|
Aid" in this fashion: BOX 90 YALE UNIVERSITY CLASS OF 1971
|
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|
|
Negatives. Full length views of nude freshmen men, front, back and rear.
|
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|
|
Includes weight, height, previous or maximum weight, with age, name, or
|
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|
|
initials. BOX 95 MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE PHOTOGRAPHS
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|
Negatives. Made in 1950. Full length views of nude women, front, back
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|
and rear. Includes height, weight, date and age. Includes some
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|
photographs marked S.P.C.
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|
Among the other classes listed in the Finder's Aid were: the Yale
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|
classes of '50, '63, '64, '66 and '71; the Princeton class of '52; Smith
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|
'50 and '52; Vassar '42 and '52; Mount Holyoke '53; Swarthmore '51;
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|
University of California '61 and '67; Hotchkiss '71; Syracuse '50;
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|
University of Wisconsin '53; Purdue '53; University of Pennsylvania '51,
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|
and Brooklyn College '51 and '52. There were also undated photos from
|
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|
the Oregon Hospital for the Criminally Insane (which I could not
|
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|
|
distinguish in any way from the Ivy League photos). All told, there were
|
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|
some 20,000 photographs of men -- 9,000 from Yale -- and 7,000 of women.
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|
In flipping through those thousands of images (which were recently
|
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|
|
transferred to Smithsonian archives in Suitland, Md.), I found
|
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|
|
surprising testimony to the "insurmountable psychological problems" that
|
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|
|
the Denison University official had referred to. It took awhile for the
|
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|
|
"problems" to become apparent, because, as it turned out, I was not
|
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|
|
permitted to see positive photographs -- only negatives (with no names
|
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|
|
attached).
|
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|
A fascinating distinction was being exhibited here, a kind of
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|
|
light-polarity theory of prurience and privacy that absolves the
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|
negative image of the naked body of whatever transgressive power it
|
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|
might have in a positive print. There's an intuitive logic to the
|
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|
|
theory, although here the Sheldon posture-photo phenomenon exposes how
|
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|
|
fragile are the distinctions we make between the sanctioned and the
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|
|
forbidden images of the body.
|
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|
As I thumbed rapidly through box after box to confirm that the entries
|
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|
described in the Finder's Aid were actually there, I tried to glance at
|
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|
only the faces. It was a decision that paid off, because it was in them
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|
|
that a crucial difference between the men and the women revealed itself.
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|
For the most part, the men looked diffident, oblivious. That's not
|
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|
|
surprising considering that men of that era were accustomed to
|
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|
|
undressing for draft physicals and athletic-squad weigh-ins.
|
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|
But the faces of the women were another story. I was surprised at how
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|
many looked deeply unhappy, as if pained at being subjected to this
|
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|
|
procedure. On the faces of quite a few I saw what looked like grimaces,
|
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|
|
reflecting pronounced discomfort, perhaps even anger.
|
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|
I was not much more comfortable myself sitting there in the midst of
|
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|
|
stacks of boxes of such images. There I was at the end of my quest. I'd
|
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|
|
tracked down the fabled photographs, but the lessons of the
|
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|
|
posture-photo ritual were elusive.
|
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|
"THERE'S A TREMENDOUS LESSON HERE," MISS manners declares. "Which is
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|
that one should have sympathy and tolerance for respectable women from
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|
whose past naked pictures suddenly show up. One should think of the many
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|
|
times where some woman becomes prominent like Marilyn Monroe and
|
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|
|
suddenly there are nude pictures in her past. Shouldn't we be a little
|
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|
|
less condemning of someone in that position?"
|
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|
A little less condemning of the victims, yes, certainly. (I speak as one
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|
|
myself, although it turned out that my photo was burned in the Yale
|
|
|
|
bonfire of the late 70's.) But what about the perpetrators? What could
|
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|
|
have possessed so many elite institutions of higher education to turn
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their student bodies over to the practitioners of what now seems so
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dubious a science project?
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It's a question that baffles the current powers that be at Ivy League
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schools. The response of Gary Fryer, Yale's spokesman, is
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representative: "We searched, but there's nobody around now who was
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involved with the decision." Even so, he assures me, nothing like it
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could happen again; concerns about privacy have heightened, and, as he
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puts it, "there's now a Federal law against disclosing anything in a
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college student's record to any outsider without written permission."
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In other words, "We won't get fooled again." Though he is undoubtedly
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correct that nothing precisely like the posture-photo folly could happen
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again, it is hard to deny the possibility, the likelihood, that
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well-meaning people and institutions will get taken in -- are being
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taken in -- by those who peddle scientific conjecture as certainty.
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Sheldon's dream of reducing the complexity of human personality and the
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contingency of human fate to a single number is a recurrent one, as the
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continuing I.Q. controversy demonstrates. And a reminder that skepticism
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is still valuable in the face of scientific claims of certainty,
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particularly in the slippery realms of human behavior.
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The rise and fall of "sciences" like Marxist history, Freudian
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psychology and Keynesian economics suggests that at least some of the
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beliefs and axioms treated as science today (Rorschach analysis,
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"rational choice" economics, perhaps) will turn out to have little more
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validity than nude stick-pin somatotyping.
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In the Sheldon rituals, the student test subjects were naked -- but it
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was the emperors of scientific certainty who had no clothes.
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Photos: W. H. Sheldon, the posture-photo guru. Wellesley student (circa
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1930) with posture-measuring pins. (FROM "THE VARIETIES OF HUMAN
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PHYSIQUE."); Examples of Sheldon's endo-, meso- and ectomorphs, right.
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(RESEARCH QUARTERLY/AAHPERD, FROM NEW YORK UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES)(pg.
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26-27); Sheldon believed that photos like these could yield a
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three-digit number to define a person's temperament. Insets: Wellesley
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posture technicians and their laboratories circa 1930. (SINGLE POSTURE
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PHOTO: FROM "ATLAS OF MEN," FROM NEW YORK UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES.
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TRIPTYCHS: FROM "THE VARIETIES OF HUMAN PHYSIQUE." INSETS: RESEARCH
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QUARTERLY/AAHPERD.)(pgh. 28-29); Whether scandal or folly, the strange
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phenomenon of the nude "posture photos" is also a kind of touchstone for
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registering attitudes toward body, race and gender in the past
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half-century. (SINGLE POSTURE PHOTO: FROM "ATLAS OF MEN." TRIPTYCHS,
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LEFT AND SECOND FROM RIGHT: FROM "ATLAS OF MEN"; OTHERS: FROM "THE
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VARIETIES OF HUMAN PHYSIQUE." INSETS: RESEARCH QUARTERLY/AAHPERD.)(pg.
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30-31)
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