Ashley Montagu


By ANTHONY RAMIREZ

Ashley Montagu, the London-born anthropologist and popular author whose energy, erudition and showmanship brought genetics, paleontology and other topics in the life sciences to a wide American audience, died Friday in Princeton, N.J. He was 94.

The author of more than 60 books, Montagu recently completed a substantial revision, published this year, of his influential 1953 book, "The Natural Superiority of Women," and was collaborating with his biographer, Susan Sperling, when he was hospitalized in March. He died of protracted cardiovascular disease, Ms. Sperling said in an interview.

Montagu's wide-ranging career as a freelance commentator on nearly everything human, along with his white hair, owlish glasses and pipe, made him the public picture of the professor in the 1950s and 1960s. But despite a voluminous production of scholarly works, he was unable to win tenure at any of the universities where he taught, according to Ms. Sperling. That slight was due, in part, to his ideas about the equality of the races and the sexes, which were startling for their day, she said.

Montagu wrote books on anthropology, human anatomy, intelligence, marriage, why people cry and the history of swearing, as well as an account of John Merrick, the severely disfigured man of Victorian England known as the "Elephant Man." His commentary extended even to the prehistoric. He bristled at the cartoon depiction of Neanderthal men as brutes who clubbed their women over the head, and would dash off a scathing letter to the editor whenever he read such a depiction, which he said ignored evidence of the essential gentleness of Neanderthals.

Henrika Kuklick, a University of Pennsylvania professor of the sociology of science, said Montagu was "someone who bridged the academic and the popular. His works were both accessible and academically respectable." Ms. Kuklick, author of "The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885-1945" (Cambridge University Press, 1991), added that "as a public intellectual, he ranks below Margaret Mead, but far above many others who I won't name."

Jonathan Marks, who teaches biological anthropology at the University of California, noted that Montagu's interests included genetics and anatomy, a range that would be nearly impossible in today's academia.

"He and Max Levitan wrote a standard textbook on human genetics that was used into the late 1970s, even though Montagu's original training was in anatomy," said Marks. "It's as if you could write equally well about architecture and the detailed mixing of concrete."

Montague Francis Ashley Montagu was born Israel Ehrenberg on June 28, 1905, in the East End, or largely working-class section, of London. In previous biographical articles, Montagu apparently said or made it known that he was the son of a stockbroker in the City of London, the financial district, but his father was really a tailor, a Polish-born Jew, and his mother a Russian-born Jew, according to Ms. Sperling. Although an agnostic, Montagu later acknowledged his Jewish heritage. He took his last name after Lady Mary Montagu, an 18th century woman of letters and feminist, and the other parts of his name after other writers he admired, Ms. Sperling said.

"I don't know why exactly he changed his name," Ms. Sperling said. "He was ambitious to do great things and as Israel, well, that would have been an impediment in British academia."

The classic autodidact, Montagu as a teenager puzzled his parents by visiting London's used-book stores and buying second-hand copies of challenging authors like Thomas Henry Huxley, the British biologist who championed Darwin. At 15, he won a literary contest and selected William McDougall's "Introduction to Social Psychology" as his prize. He was perhaps the first undergraduate to study physical anthropology at the University of London.

He pursued his graduate studies at Columbia University in 1927, interrupting his studies there to work in ethnology and anthropology in Italy and physical anthropology at a medical museum in London. He got his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1937 after studying under pioneers of anthropology like Franz Boas.

In 1953, he told an interviewer that the United States had had a profound effect on him. "I was brought up a stuffed-shirt Englishman. I wasn't very human. What America did for me was to humanize me. Democratize me, beginning with the man who examined my luggage on the dock in 1927. He didn't call me 'sir' and I resented it."

Montagu won his first fame in the 1940s by arguing that race was a social construct, a product of perceptions about race, rather than a biological fact. He was a principal drafter of a U.N. "Statement on Race" in 1949 that incorporated these ideas.

His most noticed work, however, was his 1953 book "The Natural Superiority of Women," in which he argued that men were a form of "incomplete" woman and that women were in many ways biologically superior. The attention and the sales from the book allowed him to resign his teaching position at Rutgers University in 1955.

The controversy, in those prefeminist days, was enormous, but nonthreatening. With his willingness to return reporters' telephone calls, Montagu was widely quoted and therefore influential. His professorial manner and dry wit made him a frequent guest on "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson.

A television producer of the day captured his appeal. "All he does is play himself -- a professor," Bob Herridge, a WCBS-TV producer, told an interviewer. "He talks about stuff like early paleolithic culture and stone artifacts of the upper Mesozoic period and you should see the fan mail! It's fantastic!"

In later years, he expanded his commentary to things like Ivy League dress. "The Ivy League look in men's fashions is to be deplored on a number of grounds, if not on the ground of taste itself," he wrote in 1958.

Although an occasional pipe smoker at one point in his life, he opposed tobacco in public places. If smoking cannot be banned on airplanes, smokers should at least be segregated to the back of the plane, he wrote in 1971. "It would be a simple act of civility and serve to increase the pleasure of both nonsmokers and smokers -- the nonsmokers breathing relatively unpolluted air and the smokers enjoying the pollution of others as well as their own."

Montagu is survived by his wife, the former Marjorie Peakes, and three children, Audrey Murphy of Sutton, Mass.; Barbara Johnstone of Princeton, and Geoffrey Montagu of Los Angeles. He also had four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

The Ashley Montegu Institute