Race and the Making of American Political Science. Jessica Blatt
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is one thing to announce a new course for political knowledge and another to chart one, however. The frequency of calls for empiricism at APSA meetings over the years suggests that many continued to have misgivings about the discipline’s progress on that front. And not all observers were left with the impression that the APSA offered anything new or unusual. For example, when Political Science Quarterly reviewed the first issue of the Proceedings of the American Political Science Association, it affirmed that the “association’s field of activity” was to be the “study of the state,” with perhaps a novel emphasis on administrative law.26
Certainly around this time it became less common for every commentary on a given political event or institution to sweep through the centuries in search of origins and explanations. The valorization of inductivism and fact-gathering, moreover, meant that the writing in political science journals was drained of much of its drama. Page after page of the profession’s journals would be stuffed with matter-of-fact reports of legislative and judicial action, political developments, and administrative organization in the United States, Europe, and colonial possessions, often with little in the way of analysis and even less of the lofty pronouncements that Burgess had favored and that Goodnow would mock as “empyrean … speculation.”27
Nevertheless, these shifts masked significant continuities, particularly with regard to questions of racial difference and democratic unity. When Burgess was its leading light, political science had rested heavily on the tenets that races were organic and naturally separate units, that whites (and particularly “Teutons”) were superior, and that political interference with the natural racial order was doomed to fail. As we shall see, this did not change as his influence waned. Nor, even as political scientists sought to distance themselves from philosophical generalization, were grand pronouncements about the relative capacities and proper hierarchy of races subject to much in the way of empirical scrutiny. On the contrary, as they had in Burgess’s work, invocations of racial difference continued to serve almost as talismans anchoring propositions about political life to seemingly basic facts of nature.
Moreover, if there was a generational break in political science, it was one without an explicitly ideological edge. Despite the general recognition that both new modes of political analysis and governing would be required, most prominent political scientists of Wilson’s generation followed Burgess in viewing active government more as a danger than as the democratizing force some left progressives championed.28 During the Gilded Age, political economy and sociology attracted many young, reform-minded scholars steeped in “dissenting evangelical piety and social millennialism” and seeking new solutions to the “social question.” Their political commitments often put them sharply at odds with more conservative colleagues, resulting in hard-fought contests for control of departments and professional associations.29 However, whereas many aspiring economists and sociologists were animated by alarm at the harms to the masses wrought by capitalism, the group that led APSA tended to view the problem the other way around. In general, political scientists of this generation concerned themselves more with the damage that ill-conceived or excessive democracy might do to a modern, industrial state.30
However, there was a general sentiment that a doctrinaire commitment to limited government would no longer suffice. It would be the task of a science of politics and administration to guide government’s pursuit of social goals while keeping that pursuit within reasonable limits. Wilson’s one-time Johns Hopkins classmate Albert Shaw captured this general feeling in his presidential address to the APSA just a few years after Goodnow’s, affirming that, “for better or for worse,” new forces—particularly calls for economic regulation—were transforming the country. He was unenthusiastic at this prospect—he preferred “no rules of the game” to “very bad ones” that might “discourage wealth production.” Still it was evident that “everywhere there is … a powerful determination to make use of … governmental power and agency.” If, as he believed, this could not be stopped, then the APSA’s task was to bring a “moderating” and “scientific spirit” to bear on when and how such power might be used.31
Stephen Skowronek casts Wilson’s presidency in this light. For Skowronek, Wilson’s liberal reforms as president were motivated less by a desire to transform society or its basic hierarchies than to preserve the essence of an old social and racial order in new circumstances.32 An examination of the racial entailments of Wilson’s political science lends support to this view. His scholarship was consistently animated by the sense that the old institutions of American politics had failed and only new arrangements could guarantee the kind of society those institutions had once sustained. However, this was not at all unique to Wilson. An orientation to reform as a method of conservation or recuperation of old values and hierarchies was a common theme in political science journals and meetings during this period.
Wilson’s influence probably played a part in promoting this orientation. Congressional Government, which was published in 1885, had been an argument for just such a program of reform. That work pointed to a radical disjuncture between the constitutional theory of balanced, separated powers and what Wilson saw as the post–Civil War reality of “congressional supremacy.” For Wilson, the central problem with American government was exemplified by the ability of a minority in Congress to enact radical policies, such as Reconstruction (that “extraordinary carnival of public crime” that resulted when freed slaves were thrust into “unnatural” ascendancy over whites).33
For most constitutional analysts, the fragmentation of the American system was its defining democratic feature, in that it hindered a potentially tyrannical concentration of power at the top. Wilson saw attachment to this idea as backward-looking and sentimental, arguing that in a context where the real threat came from tyrannical minorities, a strong executive better guaranteed liberty. His model was the British system in which a ruling party controlling both parliament and the prime minister’s office provided clearer lines of accountability and democratic control.
Wilson’s argument was provocative. In advocating a fundamental reordering of the constitutional system, it displaced Burgess’s “ideal American commonwealth”34 from the pinnacle of political development. It suggested that the flowering of Teutonic liberty might be off course in America or, worse, that no course might be charted at all. Wilson’s empiricism was certainly limited—it has been widely noted that he never actually visited Congress while conducting his research. Still, the book was exciting in that it sought to analyze “actual practices” of politics, and not just juridical forms. It received praiseful notice for the sharp contrast it drew between the ideal and the real, as well as for its sense that present politics were more dynamic than previously suggested.
Still, Congressional Government was far from a radical screed. As it happened, the terms of present politics were not good, and the changes Wilson advocated were meant to recuperate what could be salvaged of a lost past. Crucially, this included a racial order that had been disrupted by the Civil War and Reconstruction. In Wilson’s estimation, after Lincoln’s death, organized minorities who controlled the committee system in Congress—notably the Radical Republicans pushing Reconstruction policies—had run roughshod over the weak executive, resulting in such tyrannical measures as federal election inspectors enforcing black voting rights over the objections of southern whites and the officials whites had elected.35 For Wilson, the fragmentation of government meant to keep it in check instead provided opportunities for an extremist minority to gain unwonted power and to foist an alien people onto the American electorate.
In the 1885 book, the (mostly implied) remedy was a more deliberative legislature, closely integrated with the executive branch. In his 1908 Constitutional Government, Wilson would place more emphasis on the executive, looking” to the President as the unifying force in our complex system, the leader both of his party and of the nation,” and as a prudent antidote to an unreflective, minority-driven Congress.36 As Wilson saw it, the executive reflected the naturally conservative will of the (white) “people” as a whole. That is, the executive embodied or gave expression to something quite akin to Burgess’s “state,” still identified with the Anglo-Saxon element of the American population but now residing in the presidency rather than in the judiciary. Burgess had looked to the