Race and the Making of American Political Science. Jessica Blatt
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enemies in principle of the American republic and of the political civilization of the world.”86
Three sources threatened such revolution: sectionalism, “pollution” by “non-Aryan elements,” and “so-called socialistic movements.” Sectionalism, while largely defeated in the Civil War, had demonstrated its terrible power in that conflict and still threatened in the form of Populism. For their part, the threats of non-Aryan pollution and socialism were linked by the fact that “looking to government” was a (Southern- and Eastern-) “European habit.” The strength of socialism in the United States, then, was owed to “the immense immigration into our population of that very element of Europe’s population to which such propositions appeal.”87
These threats led Burgess, despite his suspicion of regulatory measures and zeal for liberty, to embrace a draconian interpretation of government’s police powers in some cases.88 The element that threatened American liberty by importing socialistic ideas also constituted a threat by its very nature—the disorder to which those non-Aryan European populations were prone might be a justification for increased governmental capacity on a permanent basis. This meant that the “conclusions of practical politics” that followed from state theory included the “prime policy”—indeed, “duty”—of a modern constitutional government “to attain proper physical boundaries and to render its population ethnically homogeneous,” thereby following “the indications of nature and aid[ing] the ethnical impulse to conscious development.” Similarly, government could permissibly “insist … upon the use of a common language and upon the establishment of homogeneous institutions and laws.” This could include the use of force, which when put to such ends, was “not only justifiable … but morally obligatory.” Government might, for example, “righteously deport” any “ethnically hostile population,” and ought to secure borders against “deleterious” foreign influences.89 Identifying “disorderly” with racialized groups allowed Burgess to embrace both liberty (for the uncorrupted Teutons) and authoritarianism (for everyone else).
One of Burgess’s prize pupils, Richmond Mayo-Smith, took a similar position in his extensive work on immigration. This is perhaps even more striking in Mayo-Smith’s case. While no radical, Mayo-Smith took far more moderate and labor-friendly political stances than his mentor. So his views are harder to dismiss as a pure rationalization of reactionary ideology.
A statistician and political economist, Mayo-Smith was among the founders of the American Economic Association (AEA). Richard T. Ely had founded the AEA in 1885 in order to create a home for institutionalist economics, an alternative to neoclassical theory that was friendlier to stateled reform efforts. As Ely put it in an early mission statement for the group, the neoclassical principle of laissez-faire was “unsafe in politics and unsound in morals.”90 Mayo-Smith was a moderate figure—in fact Ely recruited him, along with E. R. A. Seligman, another moderately reformist Columbia-affiliated economist, in part to soften any image of the AEA as a home for left politics. Still, Mayo-Smith viewed the question of government regulation as a matter of expediency more than principle, seeking to develop statistical methods that could evaluate policy initiatives on a case-by-case basis. He also evinced considerably more solicitude for the working classes than Burgess did, developing close ties to labor and to the settlement house movement.91 Nonetheless, this solicitude only applied to racially acceptable members of the working class, and especially to those who were already present on U.S. soil.
Mayo-Smith deployed the framework of state theory against the claim that universal, natural rights claims might be relevant to immigration policy. Like Burgess, he cast the very notion of such rights as a misunderstanding, born of a narrowness of vision that mistakes the present state of things for eternal truth. In his view, rights and liberties were “merely historical,” a grant conferred by a state that “may also withdraw it.” And even if such rights had developed, they would be trumped by America’s “duty to humanity” to exclude “the depraved dregs of European civilization” and thereby to see to it “that civilization progresses.”92
Indeed, America’s immigrant past could only properly be understood within this framework of progress. In its earlier, lower state of civilization, America needed foreign population to claim the continent’s vast resources. The harshness of the early period of settlement mitigated the danger of welcoming that labor since the difficult conditions of the early years fortunately “kill[ed] off a large number of those consigned” to them. Even so, as a nation progressed, Mayo-Smith argued, it lost its “capacity of absorbing the lower elements of other civilizations,” and America was “getting to the limit set by nature” for the “work” of offering “opportunity to the poor and degraded of Europe.” This did not represent a loss, however, because humanity’s interest did not lie in the fate of its degraded members but rather in that of its elite: the “duty of every nation” was “to see to it that the higher civilization triumphs over the lower” by “preserving its own civilization against the disintegrating forces of barbarism.”93
A similar logic explains why Burgess, who pronounced fulsomely on the duties of the Teutonic nations to have “a colonial policy,” opposed expansion of American empire overseas when that became a practical possibility.94 Burgess described the Spanish-American War and subsequent annexation of the Philippines as “the first great shock” of his professional career and, along with his colleagues, devoted many pages of the Columbia-based Political Science Quarterly (PSQ) to arguments against such a premature adventure.95 In a typical passage, Burgess wrote, “So long as we do not inhabit two-thirds of the territory on this continent; so long as we have not explored, much less exploited, its resources; so long as we remain in large measure a mixed population of Americans, Europeans and Africans; … so long as we have an Indian problem and a Mormon problem and a negro problem, to say nothing of many less important questions—so long, it seems to me, we should more nearly follow the natural order of things, if we should remain at home and attend to our own domestic affairs.”96
Burgess’s “despondency and despair” at the American declaration of war was a response also to what he perceived as the eagerness of the business class to promote war “for the sake of profiteering by the vast increase of governmental expenditures.” Quite apart from the greed this displayed, Burgess believed those expenditures and the demands of war would occasion an unwarranted increase in government (as opposed to “state”) power. Also, much like the greedy nationalism to which the antebellum South had fallen prey, this fervor for war would divert from the progress of American liberty by adding the burdens of colonial administration and a new, racially inferior population. Particularly distressing was “to see that Americans were, after all, a warlike people, superficially informed, and easy to incite on Quixotic enterprises.” That is, the best representatives of the American nation had not, as expected, advocated limited government and the further Aryanization of the American population as a principled stand, irrespective of baser motives.97
Burgess’s shock that the American business class might put profit over principle may seem naïve (even if the principle in question was a commitment to racial purity). At the same time, it highlights the degree to which Burgess saw the world in racialized terms—the Teutonic genius was meant to show itself in that race’s best men, and if America’s upper classes couldn’t be trusted to make sound and sober judgments, even in the face of recent experience and scientific advance, this would be a serious blow. However, the point is not to evaluate the strength of Burgess’s analysis. It is, rather, that Burgess’s “attempt to apply the method, which has been found so productive in the domain of Natural Science, to Political Science and Jurisprudence” relied centrally on the idea that historical progress was racial progress.98
By the turn of the twentieth century, Burgess’s work would come to seem increasingly old-fashioned. A younger generation of political scientists, including future U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, would reject Burgess’s intellectual style and many of his conclusions. Nevertheless, many of the racial ideas shaping the older man’s thought would recur in his successors’ work, and others would be only subtly recast. As the next chapters will show, the idea that organic, racialized “peoples” were the protagonists of history and the true subjects of democracy