SOURCE: Franz Boas, Social Activist: The Dynamics of Ethnicity, pp. ix-xii Greenwood Press, 1990.

In the following excerpt, Hyatt applauds Boas's efforts to effect social change.

The life and thought of Franz Boas has had a profound impact on many diverse elements of American society. In a sense this German-born anthropologist can be viewed as a symbol of the age in which the United States responded to its rapid modernization at the onset of the twentieth century. Finding himself caught up in the whirlwind that resulted from such wholesale disequilibrium, Boas did his part to ease the national process of readaptation. During his long career in the United States, he responded not only to the shifting nature of American values but also to two world wars fought against his land of birth and a massive economic depression. Far from confining himself solely to science, he tackled problems fundamental to...