Why Is Johns Hopkins Still Honoring an Antisemite?

In the wake of the congressional testimonies by the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on December 5, there has been much discussion as to whether presidents of elite universities are doing enough to police antisemitism on campus. Their reluctance to do so seems to stem partly from the contemporary perception that Jews are privileged in American society in general and well-represented in academe, and therefore not among the marginalized groups worthy of special protections. But that viewpoint overlooks much of the history of higher education in the 20th century, a time when antisemitism defined the culture of elite universities, and university presidents not only tolerated antisemitism but were themselves rabid antisemites.

Such was the case of Isaiah Bowman, who served as president of the Johns Hopkins University from 1935 until 1948. During those 13 years, Bowman fired and drove away Jewish faculty, and deterred others from coming, including some of the 20th century’s most distinguished scholars. He imposed Johns Hopkins’s first quota for Jewish students at a time when most universities were lifting theirs. In his role as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s primary adviser on resettling millions of European Jews threatened by Nazism, Bowman managed to quash almost every resettlement scheme proposed. His belief in the superiority of certain races informed his views on Jews and also rendered him hostile to having Black students at Johns Hopkins.

Bowman’s blatant racism and antisemitism not only make him worthy of censure in our time, they made him a poor university leader and a catastrophic presidential adviser even in his own era. As a result, upon retirement he did not get the accolades typically bestowed on university presidents. Still, he got more than he deserved. A bust of Bowman stands in the entryway to the campus’s Shriver Hall, and a campus road bears the name Bowman Drive.

Along with the University of Wisconsin historian Paige Glotzer, we have petitioned Johns Hopkins’s Name Review Board to stop honoring Bowman. We are asking the board, which is tasked with reconsidering controversial campus iconography, to remove the bust and change the road’s name. It is slated to consider our petition this spring.

The campaign to acknowledge Bowman’s antisemitism comes at a propitious time. As antisemitism roils American universities, Bowman’s actions serve as an important reminder of the central role that discrimination against Jews played in American universities in the first half of the last century. Insufficient appreciation of this history has made it easier to believe that Jews are not, and have never been, oppressed in higher education. An exploration of Bowman’s ignominious record undermines that supposition.

Bowman became immersed in the eugenics movement early in his career. As a geographer, he was committed to the idea that biological traits as well as geographic location shaped group characteristics. He believed firmly in racial hierarchy, the threat Black Americans and recent immigrants posed to white supremacy, and the role of science in legitimating these ideas — views he held long after they had been discredited. After earning his Ph.D. at Yale University in 1909, Bowman joined Yale’s geography faculty as an assistant professor. When the department closed in 1915, he became president of the American Geographical Society (AGS). Over the next 20 years, Bowman aligned the society with the eugenics movement, adding some of its most fanatic adherents to the AGS board, publishing their articles in the society’s journal, and touting their books. For example, Bowman approved the reappointment of his friend and notorious scientific racist Madison Grant to the AGS board six times between 1917 and 1932. Bowman wrote that Grant’s 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, would force geographers to look beyond the physical environment and pay attention to “the primal and inheritable qualities of race.” To help in that endeavor, the society’s journal published colored “race maps” derived from Grant’s book that charted the geographical locations of the Nordic race and other “more backward” races.

By the end of the 1920s, Bowman was well known in eugenics circles, although he was not a public leader of the movement. His own writings reveal his racist sentiments, including an AGS-published book in which he described how he used his riding whip “to beat … into submission” an Indigenous man who refused to be his guide on an expedition in Peru. Bowman’s 1921 book, The New World: Problems in Political Geography, reached a wide audience, going through four editions and several translations. In it, he claimed that the latest wave of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe would “dilute and weaken our national character.” He also accused Jewish merchants and bankers in Hungary of placing a “stranglehold” upon the peasantry and contributing to the country’s “plexus of evils.”

Johns Hopkins appointed Bowman president in 1935, apparently at the urging of Frank B. Jewett, the president of Bell Labs, then known for refusing to hire Jews. He promptly began driving Jewish faculty away and preventing the university from hiring more. In 1941, Bowman fired Eric F. Goldman, a Hopkins Ph.D. who had just received a unanimous-reappointment vote from the history department. When the department chair asked Bowman to explain the reason for Goldman’s dismissal, he replied, “There are already too many Jews at Johns Hopkins.” The eminent historian Charles Beard resigned in protest. Princeton hired Goldman, who became a renowned author, teacher, and public intellectual.

Bowman did not have to directly dismiss Jewish faculty to accomplish his goal of fewer Jews at Hopkins. He also created an institutional environment where Jewish scholars felt unwelcome. After Nazi Germany began its purge of Jewish scholars in the early 1930s, Bowman’s predecessor hired James Franck, a Nobel laureate in physics, from Göttingen University. Three years into Bowman’s presidency, Franck decamped for the University of Chicago because, as Franck later said in an interview, “Bowman made life very difficult for Jewish faculty.” Bowman’s actions after Franck announced he was leaving indicate just how difficult. Bowman told Franck that he “acted un-American in making the move,” and made it known that Franck was leaving because Chicago offered “better financial arrangements,” a hint of the antisemitic canard that Jews were greedy. Franck was “astonished and humiliated” and demanded an apology, which never came.

Similarly alienated was the molecular biologist Tracy Sonneborn, who in 1939 was on track to be the new head of zoology at Hopkins. But Bowman told Sonneborn he would not allow it because Sonneborn, as a Jew, would be subject to “irresistible pressures” to hire other Jews, and that would in turn cause non-Jews to depart. Bowman insisted Sonneborn’s hiring would “ruin the department.” Sonneborn ultimately took a position at Indiana University.

In 1947, Bowman sabotaged what likely would have been an impressive Hopkins hire when the department of political economy unanimously recommended that the university lure Simon Kuznets from the University of Pennsylvania. After asking someone if Kuznets was “you know, a Jewy Jew,” Bowman then offered him a salary much lower than he had been promised. Kuznets later said that Bowman’s offer had kept him from moving. Hopkins eventually landed Kuznets, a few years after Bowman’s death. He later went on to win the 1971 Nobel Prize in Economics.

Sometimes Bowman’s antisemitic reputation discouraged Hopkins faculty from putting Jewish candidates forward in the first place. In 1946, the Hopkins history department considered making an offer to the historian Richard Hofstadter, then at the University of Maryland. The department ultimately decided not to bother because “there was fear in the department that Bowman might make difficulty when he found out that Hofstadter was half Jewish.” Hofstadter went to Columbia University and rapidly became one of the 20th century’s greatest historians; he would twice receive the Pulitzer Prize.

After the Nazis came to power, Bowman’s fear of accumulating too many Jewish faculty members also made him reluctant to add refugee scholars. After his predecessor hired four refugees as tenured professors between 1932 and 1934, including Franck, Bowman slowed the pace and made short-term offers. During his first three years as president, he made only one offer to a German refugee: the classicist Theodor Ernst Mommsen, a Protestant, who ended up going to Yale instead. After the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, Hopkins agreed to take on seven refugees, all for limited appointments.

Bowman did not hide why Hopkins made less of an effort to embrace exiled European scholars than institutions such as the University of Chicago, Vassar College, and the Institute for Advanced Study. In a 1940 letter to the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars refusing to extend the appointment of Paul Friedländer, a classical philologist who had previously taught at the University of Halle, Bowman explained: “Dr. Friedländer is the kind of man whom we would like to have at this University, and we cannot say enough in his praise. But his specialty is Greek, and we already have a Jew, Dr. [Harold] Cherniss, in the Department of Greek.” Bowman also declined to help two imprisoned German geographers, Karl Wittfogel and Alfred Philippson, when direct appeals were made to him.

But Bowman’s antisemitism didn’t stop with faculty hiring. Unlike other top private universities, Hopkins never had a quota for Jewish undergraduates — until Bowman became president. In 1935, Jewish students accounted for 18 percent of undergraduates. Bowman cut that figure by nearly half, creating a secret quota of 10 percent. His reason: Hopkins was “becoming a practically Jewish organization.” A year after instituting the quota, Bowman said privately: “Jews don’t come to Hopkins to make the world better or anything like that. They come for two things: to make money and to marry non-Jewish women.”

Despite the barriers they faced, Jewish students at least had the opportunity to attend Hopkins, something denied to Black students outright. The university admitted its first Black undergraduate in 1945, but no other Black students appear to have been enrolled as undergraduates until after Bowman’s resignation. A similar situation existed for Black applicants to the university’s graduate programs. In a few cases, Bowman personally stood in their way, impugning their preparation and intelligence.

In 1947, Betty Pelzer, a part-time researcher on one of Bowman’s refugee-settlement projects, published articles in The Baltimore Sun decrying the unequal social treatment of Black students at Johns Hopkins and calling for an end to the “color line.” Infuriated, Bowman retaliated by firing Betty’s husband, Karl Pelzer, a refugee scholar teaching in the Johns Hopkins geography department. Pelzer spent the next 30 years at Yale, directing its program in Southeast Asia studies — another star lost.

There is little doubt that Bowman’s attitude toward Jewish faculty hurt Johns Hopkins. Within a decade, the university lost a Nobel Prize winner, a future Nobelist, two eminent scientists, and three of the era’s finest historians, among others. Bowman’s antisemitism ran so deep that he willingly risked the university’s stature, leaving one of the worst legacies of any president of a leading research university.

But Bowman arguably did even more damage in his capacity as a government official. In 1938, he signed on to be Roosevelt’s special adviser on refugee settlement, ostensibly to help the administration find places that could accommodate the growing number of Jews trying to flee Europe. Bowman’s actual role seemed to be to find myriad reasons resettlement could not work, often based on racist notions that white people could not survive in the tropics, or that Jews settling in large numbers would come to dominate a region’s economy. President Roosevelt, who knew Bowman from being an AGS member for a dozen years, chose the geographer at least partly due to his knowledge of Latin America, an area seemingly ripe for settlement. But Bowman nixed every country suggested there, with the exception of a tiny community in the Dominican Republic, and finally advised Roosevelt to avoid Latin America entirely.

Instead, Bowman preferred a plan to send small groups of Jewish refugees to agricultural colonies scattered across the globe. That, he reasoned, would prevent Jewish refugees from achieving economic dominance in areas in which they settled, and keep them away from urban areas from where they might immigrate more easily to the United States. According to the historians Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman, Bowman’s approach “represented a dead-end for refugees, given the difficulty of managing all of its moving parts.”

Indeed, the entire resettlement effort was a dead-end. The administration never attempted to transfer large numbers of Jews, leaving them trapped in Nazi Europe. Throughout the process, Bowman seemed more interested in collecting data to further his racist ideas, than in saving lives. “The whole enterprise [of refugee settlement] ought to be conceived not as an emergency measure for population in flight but as a broad scientific undertaking,” Bowman argued.

Even knowledge of the Holocaust did not temper Bowman’s commitment to racism and antisemitism. In his capacity as a high-level adviser to the State Department, Bowman received a confidential eyewitness report in 1943 that described the procedures being used to gas thousands of Jews at the Belzec extermination center and included ghastly photographs. Bowman’s biographer, Neil Smith, concluded that Bowman, through his resettlement work and other policy positions, “abetted and contributed to the broad failure of the United States and Allied governments even to attempt a rescue of Jews and millions of other refugees from Europe.”

Bowman lost his governmental influence as soon as Harry S. Truman became president in April 1945 — too late, of course, for the many Jewish refugees he might have helped. Bowman remained at Johns Hopkins for another three years, retiring before the completion of his third term. He died in 1950 at the age of 71.

Given his appalling record, there is no reason for Johns Hopkins to continue to honor Bowman. Bowman’s actions easily meet the university’s Name Review Board’s criteria for removing, renaming, or replacing campus iconography. Hopkins also faces no legal obstacles in changing the name of Bowman Drive, as neither a donor request nor trustee action led to the adoption of the road name. A donor bequest did lead to the placement of the bust of Bowman in Shriver Hall in 1937, but the university has already placed in storage controversial murals once displayed there that were donated as part of the same bequest.

There is plenty of precedent for such changes. Several colleges have recently removed former presidents’ names from campus buildings, including Caltech, Indiana University, and Princeton University. Johns Hopkins should do the same — and there is no better time to do so than the present, with antisemitism again stirring American campuses. Acknowledging the actions of an antisemitic and racist president who put lives at risk can allow us all to incorporate this understanding into the current conversation, and possibly chart a different path.