Race and the Making of American Political Science. Jessica Blatt
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be spearheaded primarily by younger men representing a range of institutions, not exclusively academic.15
Exactly how Burgess was sidelined is murky. What is clear, however, is that the leadership of the new APSA wished to chart a new course. When Goodnow gave APSA’s first presidential address, he put his listeners on notice that from then forward the discipline would not “permit” the “political philosopher … to roam at will, subject to no check on the exuberancy of his fancy or caprice.” Rather, political scholarship would attend scrupulously to “the extra-legal customs and extra-legal organizations” that shape the “actual political system of a country.”16
This shift would leave the discipline less explicitly anchored to a theory of American democracy as Aryan Volksgeist and as a result would authorize a more experimental and pragmatic view of American institutions. Interpreting the development of the state and remaining true to its spirit had been Burgess’s central preoccupations. For many younger political scientists, “science” and “spirit” were antithetical terms. To qualify as the former, political scholarship had to offer a hardheaded appraisal of the facts, uncorrupted by preconceived philosophical frameworks, and point to real-world solutions to urgent problems of the day.
As we have seen, amid this increasing insistence on an inductive, empirical orientation to political life, “the state” did not disappear but began to shed some of its prescriptive force. Where once the term had been central to professional political analysis, signifying the soul of the race and the source of sovereignty, after the turn of the century the idea of a state standing behind and authorizing government increasingly came to signal the more prosaic notion that governing forms and practices reflected, and ought to be appropriate to, the character of a “people.”17 Less concerned with discerning the normative content of history, political scientists like Wilson and like-minded colleagues sought to describe and understand the functioning of American institutions and were open to the idea that those institutions might need fundamental alteration if they were to continue to serve American ideals.
Nonetheless, a racialized conception of “the people” persisted and helped to lend a conservative cast to political scientists’ reformism. For example, Wilson no less than Burgess held up Reconstruction as the prime example of a failure to grasp the basic facts of political life and of the ways in which the American system could fail to safeguard the people’s will. For many of Wilson’s contemporaries, too, Reconstruction served as a cautionary tale about both racial difference and the dangers of political action guided by principle rather than by a dispassionate, scientific estimation of political life as it was. To be scientific, political science would have to attend less to doctrine. Its task, rather, would be to discern how the practice of politics could accommodate not only new economic and social realities but also lasting “anthropological” truths.
Both this more pragmatic, experimental attitude and the sense that racial issues were of prime importance put political scientists firmly in the intellectual mainstream at the turn of the century. The Progressive Era in the United States and elsewhere was animated by an intense faith that scientific knowledge could solve social problems. And while progressivism had a left flank that engaged structural economic questions, among many American progressives, “social problems” often served as shorthand for the existence of people different from themselves and/or operating for whatever reason outside the bounds of familiar norms and hierarchies. Racial (and what were coming to be distinguished as “ethnic”) differences received special attention.18
Of course the term progressive is now applied to a broad range of tendencies, and many intellectuals and other elites at the turn of the century didn’t fit the label at all. However, as Rogers Smith puts it, the era nevertheless saw an “elite convergence” on certain ideals and a strong push for government to enact reforms guided by them. In Michael McGerr’s gloss, the progressive tendency centered on four “quintessential” ends: “to change other people; to end class conflict; to control big business; and to segregate society.” Similarly, Smith connects the various strains of progressivism through a common vision of a “modern democratically and scientifically guided nation that was also culturally ordered, unified, and civilized due to the predominance of northern European elements in its populace and customs.”19
It was in many ways a frightening period for the educated middle and upper classes. William McKinley’s victory over William Jennings Bryan in the 1896 presidential election ended the threat posed by Populism and the radical, farmer-worker alliance that had propelled it. But it did not resolve the issues underlying that insurgency and others like it: the rise of unprecedentedly massive corporations and consolidation of wealth at the top that seemed to threaten republican ideals; a breathtaking pace of urbanization and immigration that transformed the landscape and population; crippling, repeated economic depressions that fueled intense, often violent episodes of labor protest and repression.20 The cities seemed to be exploding, and at times they actually did—revolutionary anarchists and others bombed and otherwise targeted political and business figures, factories, railroads, and other symbols of capitalist power at the turn of the century regularly enough to make such attacks “a central preoccupation of American politics and culture.”21 The acquisition by the United States of overseas colonies likewise presented challenges to traditional notions of the country’s place in the world.
Nonetheless, it was also a time of wild, even utopian hopes among many elites. Where economic, ideological, and demographic changes threatened anarchy, progressives of various political stripes had great faith that scientific insight and the power of the state could be wielded in concert to produce a harmonious, well-ordered society. In The Promise of American Life, perhaps the paradigmatic statement of centrist progressivism, Herbert Croly argued that American prosperity, free political institutions, and the “worthier set of men” these would create offered “the highest hope for an excellent worldly life that mankind has yet ventured.”22 Unlike Burgess and Adams, who looked to the past to guide the present, progressives were predisposed to see modernity itself—big, efficient institutions, including government, corporations, and labor unions; expanded trade; and, for some, overseas territory—as American democracy’s best hope for deliverance from the scourges of economic depression, socialism, and general unrest. Fueled by support from industrialists interested in promoting scientific and technical progress, an explosion of professional societies, universities, and specialized journals promised new platforms for a newly self-conscious intellectual class eager to put its expertise at the service of this project.
In this context, many of the first homegrown PhDs in political science in the United States thought that the time was ripe to expand the purview of political scholarship and to make themselves useful to a government that had recently taken on new functions, including the management of an overseas empire. The rapid transformation of the American economy and society since the mid-nineteenth century had, they affirmed, delivered a world qualitatively different from that of the previous generation. The old formulas simply no longer applied.
Burgess’s political science sought to legitimate and proscribe, depending on the idea of “the state” to authorize American democracy while simultaneously marking its limits. The dominant tendency among the political scientists who would assume disciplinary leadership after Burgess, however, would be to see the workings of democracy as more pressing than its warrants. Goodnow, along with Wilson and others, consistently emphasized that things like democratic legitimacy and what Goodnow called “that elusive thing called sovereignty” had been problems for a post–Civil War age.23 “Efficiency” and “administration” were to be the watchwords of the new century, and the organization of the APSA was meant to put political science in step with the times.
To accomplish this, political scholarship would need to move away from the legalism and teleology of earlier years, and toward what appeared to be firmer scientific (that is, realistic, empirical, and inductive) footing. According to Shaw, twentieth-century political science would consist of “the orderly presentation of facts and the formulating of conclusions … of practical benefit to the perplexed legislator in time of his need.”24 As a result, things like the search for the Teutonic origins of liberty came to seem much less urgent, even quaint. Political scientists, Wilson urged, needed to