This is the story of how a small group of anthropologists, many of them students of the German émigré Franz Boas, shaped American thought from the late nineteenth century until the mid-1960s by democratizing American conceptions of culture, putting class analysis on the agenda of American social science, rehabilitating the American character, studying American values, and reconciling American culture and civilization.

My story begins in 1886, when Franz Boas left Germany to seek his fortune in the United States. Between the time of his arrival in the United States and his death in 1942, Boas reoriented American anthropology around a broad, pluralistic, relativistic, and holistic conception of culture. The connotations of pluralism, relativism, and holism were not present in Matthew Arnold's humanistic conception of culture as “the best that has been thought and known in the world,” nor were they present in E. B. Tylor's charter definition of culture in its technical, anthropological sense as a “complex whole.” To these connotations, anthropologists subsequently added a concern with patterning and a stress on the structural aspects of culture. Although new in American usage, these connotations had long been familiar in Germany, where, from the late eighteenth century on, the educated middle classes invoked a particularistic and relativistic Kultur to defend their way of life from the threat posed by a universalistic civilization emanating from Paris. In the United States, this conception of culture fell on peculiarly fertile ground.