Race and the Making of American Political Science. Jessica Blatt
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on this role, protecting tradition and safeguarding (whites’) liberty against alien influences and the misguided crusades of ideological minorities. Wilson’s proposed radical restructuring and strengthening of American government was a way to direct and temper government action in the service of existing hierarchies—the forms and methods would be new, but they would be deployed for old purposes.
“Not Factitious but Anthropological”
Wilson sought constitutional reordering in order to safely accommodate new realities—including, especially, the reality of a free African American population. The question of how to accommodate American institutions to a new, post-Reconstruction racial settlement loomed equally large at APSA meetings and in political science journals. Some commentators, like Wilson, would recommend new political arrangements. Others would turn primarily to administration, suggesting that if racial others had (against all scientific principles) been given a formal, legal grant of equality, some flexibility in the application of those laws would be called for.
Across generational and theoretical divides, political scientists were united in a near-consensus that African Americans were inferior, politically incompetent, and unsuited to live under a legal system constituted by and for Anglo-Saxons.38 There was also general agreement that by their very presence in the United States African Americans challenged social peace and the viability of constitutional principles, and that any attempt to integrate them into American democracy necessarily stemmed from a catastrophic misunderstanding of that basic truth.
In an early volume of PSQ, William Chauncy Langdon articulated a principle that would go largely unchallenged in political science for some time. As he saw it, “The negro [was] not an Anglo-Saxon, or a Celt, or Scandinavian—only undeveloped and with a black skin…. The African [was] on the contrary a wholly distinct race, and the obstacles to social equality and political co-efficiency” with “our own” race were “not factitious but anthropological.”39 These judgments stood through the early years of the twentieth century (and beyond), and were voiced at APSA’s meetings and in its publications no less than they had been at Columbia and in PSQ. That is, as much as the first generation of U.S.-trained scholars may have sought to radically reorient their discipline, they were united with the founding generation in their sense that no account of politics could be scientific without an understanding of the significance of racial difference.
Even a cursory examination of Political Science Quarterly shows that the Burgess/Dunning/Wilson line on Reconstruction reigned unchallenged there for years. PSQ’s monotony in this regard certainly owes much to Dunning’s and Burgess’s influence at Columbia. However, the birth of the APSA and the launching of the American Political Science Review in 1906 led to no slackening of interest in these topics, nor did it lead to any real stirrings of dissent from the reigning estimation of Reconstruction, African Americans in general, or the prospect of racial equality on almost any front. What developed instead was a consensus that the emerging Jim Crow regime of racial segregation and stratification represented a moderate, pragmatic response to the realities of racial difference. The fact that it might occasionally do violence to constitutional strictures simply demonstrated that those strictures had been based on an inadequate and misinformed political theory that the new century could ill-afford.
In some representative examples drawn from the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, black people appeared in PSQ and, later, in papers presented at the APSA and articles in the APSR, as the “half-civilized,”40 “alien” element within the American population. At best, blacks were depicted as the “permanent[ly] … indolent and thriftless,”41 “spoil of the politician,”42 “unfit” to vote,43 lacking “initiative and inventive genius,” and prone to chicken-stealing44; at worst, “savage”45 and determined to “outrage and murder” Southern whites’ “young daughters.”46
On occasion, commenters referred with relief to the idea that negro unfitness might be a self-limiting problem. For example, in a PSQ review, Columbia’s Gary N. Calkins found grounds for optimism in Frederick Hoffman’s “convincing” thesis that “the American negro” was so racially feeble as to be headed for extinction. To Calkins’s cautious relief, “the race of negroes[’] … downward grade,” meant it was less likely to “menace our republican institutions.”47 Another author noted approvingly that “a very large proportion of the negroes born in this country die in childhood,” thus mitigating the “danger” that whites might be “overwhelmed.”48 (Bryce made a similar observation in the North American Review in 1891, commenting sanguinely that, troubling as the negro problem might be, demographic data suggested that “time [was] on the side” of “the white race.”)49
A review of these two main political science journals and the proceedings of APSA meetings up to and including 1910 yields no counters to these images of black inferiority, and just one sympathetic, extended treatment of Reconstruction and black voting rights.50 That sympathetic treatment was a 1905 address to the American Political Science Association by Albert Bushnell Hart. Hart, a German-educated Harvard historian who (like Dunning) would go on to serve as president of both the American Historical Association and the APSA, occupies an ambivalent position in Reconstruction historiography. He invoked the abolitionists as his spiritual “ancestors” and at Harvard mentored W. E. B. Du Bois, whom he invited to read a paper favorable to Reconstruction at the 1909 AHA conference.51 However, Hart also edited the series in which Wilson and Dunning’s scurrilous histories of Reconstruction appeared, and in a 1910 book he displayed a more settled belief in black inferiority (at least in the medium term) as well as what an approving APSR reviewer characterized as healthy “acceptance of the inevitable” with regard to the racial order in the post-Reconstruction south.52
Whatever his ambiguities, in 1905 Hart took an extreme minority position on Reconstruction, suggesting to listeners at the APSA that Reconstruction governments had been unfairly maligned. As Hart saw it, black suffrage during Reconstruction had been incomplete and brief and had ended via a “violent and irregular process,” leaving scholars with little real evidence as to “the capacity of the negro to exercise discretion in his vote.”53 Again, however, this position put Hart well outside the mainstream. When he delivered his paper to the APSA, he was paired with Baltimore Attorney General John Rose, whose talk on “Suffrage Conditions in the South: The Constitutional Point of View” was harshly critical of calls to enforce black voting rights; all three discussants at the panel took a similar stance.54 Rose’s address (without Hart’s) was published in the inaugural issue of the APSR under the more direct title, “Negro Suffrage: The Constitutional Point of View”; a sympathetic account of “Racial Distinctions in Southern Law” appeared alongside it.55 Clearly, these were not marginal issues—with only two other full-length pieces in that issue, exactly half of the articles in the APSR’s first issue were justifications of disenfranchisement and segregation. Moreover, aside from Hart’s cautious defense of Reconstruction, the journals and meetings featured no dissent from the proposition that sentimental ideas about equality or moralistic attachment to constitutional guarantees had no place in the scientific treatment of those issues, which was to be governed instead by pragmatic considerations and scientific dispassion.
Rose’s APSR article offers a particularly clear formulation of the pragmatic realpolitik that characterized this discussion. He acknowledged that political distinctions based on race were clearly unconstitutional and that measures such as literacy tests and “grandfather” clauses were nothing more than subterfuge. They were, nonetheless, necessary. Echoing Wilson’s faith in the wise conservatism of national opinion, Rose urged deference to prevailing norms, even when they conflicted with what Wilson had called the “literary” form of the law. The important point, to Rose’s mind, was that law that got ahead of the population was doomed to fail. As he put it,
St. Paul has said that all things that are lawful are not expedient…. Let those who believe that whether his skin be white, yellow, red, brown, or black, a man’s a man for a’ that, be of good cheer. Either they are right or wrong. If the latter they will some day be thankful