One consequence of Nazism was to discredit genetic theories, and twin studies in particular, for a generation. And in proportion to the fall of genetics was the rise of behaviorism. The behavioristic movement began in the lectures of John B. Watson at Columbia University in 1912, and it quickly produced its own tempestuous controversies. "We have been accused of being propagandists, of heralding our conclusions in the public press rather than in the more dignified scientific journals, of writing as though no one else had ever contributed to the field of psychology, of being bolshevists," Watson recalled in 1930. Watson was doing his work in an age that was convinced of the inheritance of talent, ability, and temperament, that believed in families of genius and families of criminality, that accepted racial differences without question. Watson agreed that physical traits, such as hair color or the length of one's fingers, passed through bloodlines, but the hereditary structure was only waiting to be shaped by the environment; and it might be shaped in a million different ways, depending on the training the child experienced. "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might selectdoctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors," Watson wrote, in one of the most famous boasts in psychology. Of course, the social implications of Watson's workespecially concerning race and class differenceswere shattering. If people were merely creatures of their environment, and not of their genes, then society imposed these differences, rather than simply reflecting them. Twentieth-century liberalism was born in the crusades
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