American anthropologists collected body measurements across the Middle East as geopolitical policy

Evidence

By the mid-1930s, American physical anthropologists like Henry Field, head curator of the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History and nephew of Marshall Field, regularly collected “anthropometrics” on groups from the Middle East. This was part of a larger geopolitical project in the interwar period, formalized by President Franklin Roosevelt. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 205

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the reader’s archive on how science was conscripted for imperial territorial claims (e.g., cartography and ethnology in the Drake/Armada books).
• QUESTION: What exactly was the interwar ‘larger geopolitical project’ Roosevelt formalized? Worth chasing the detail about US anthropology being conscripted into foreign policy.