The Climatic Determinism of Ellsworth Huntington

The climate work of the unrestrained and undisciplined geographic determinist, eugenicist, and popular writer Ellsworth Huntington (1876–1947) can be categorized into three large themes: the influence of weather and weather changes on workers and students, the influence of climate on world civilizations, and the influence of solar variations on climate change. The first represented a sort of meteorological Taylorism, the second a reprise of enlightenment determinism, and the third a simplistic and wholly unrealistic pseudoscientific theory. Why, then, should we bother with him? One answer was provided by the historian Arnold Toynbee, who was “enormously influenced” by Huntington’s ideas about the relation between human beings and their physical environments. It was Toynbee’s opinion that “[s]tudents of human affairs may agree or disagree with Huntington, but in either case they will be influenced by him, so it is better that they should be aware of him.” Although Huntington’s thought was indeed influential in its time, since then his racial bias and crude determinisms have been largely rejected. Nonetheless, his categorical errors seem destined to be repeated by those who make overly dramatic claims for weather and climatic influences. Ellsworth Huntington was born in Galesburg, Illinois, on September 16, 1876, the third child and eldest son of Henry Strong Huntington, a Congregationalist minister, and Mary Lawrence Herbert. The Huntingtons were proud of their Puritan ancestry, which they traced to 1633. Following the call of the ministry, the family moved to Gorham, Maine, in 1877 and then in 1889 to Milton, Massachusetts, a wealthy suburb of Boston. Ellsworth attended the public high school, where he excelled in athletics and academics. His biographers have called him reclusive, but his brother suggested that perhaps he was humble rather than shy. Huntington passed the Harvard entrance examinations, but family finances precluded his enrollment there. Instead, he attended Beloit College, where he boarded with a maternal aunt, from 1893 to 1897. Following in the footsteps of T. C. Chamberlin (Beloit 1866), Huntington studied both classics and geology, publishing his first article, on local road-making materials, in the Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences.