Race and the Making of American Political Science. Jessica Blatt
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Burgess was also an especially committed and vehement racist, even by the standards of late nineteenth-century America. With his colleague (and one-time student) William A. Dunning, Burgess “played a powerful and disreputable part” in cementing the image of Reconstruction as a “hideous tyranny” of “negro domination,” which was later popularized by Thomas Dixon’s Reconstruction novels and D. W. Griffith’s film, The Birth of a Nation.4 Burgess described the black-led Reconstruction legislatures of South Carolina and Louisiana as “the most soul-sickening spectacle that Americans had ever been called upon to behold,” and the legislators themselves as “ignorant barbarians.”5 He held firmly that “American Indians, Africans, and Asiatics” ought never to “form any active, directive part of the political population” in the United States and was skeptical about the wisdom of extending the suffrage to many non-Aryan whites.6 He thought Anglo-Saxons had a “world-duty of carrying civilization into the dark places of the earth,” justified the removal of native populations everywhere with the remark that “there is no human right to … barbarism,”7 and characterized even the most cautious statements of possible racial equality as “great sophism.” Even slavery, to which he described himself as “strongly hostile,” he saw as having been justifiable in its time “as a relation which could temporarily produce a better state of morals in a particularly constituted society than any other relation.”8 The “white man’s mission,” he wrote, “his duty and his right,” was “to hold the reins of political power in his own hands for the civilization of the world and the welfare of mankind.”9
Burgess’s attitudes are no secret. While he has been lauded as the “father” of American political science, commentators in recent decades are highly likely to note the racism that suffused his work. Particular attention has been paid to his leading role in constructing the harshly negative portrayal of Reconstruction that until recently dominated historiography on that period, and his racial views are invoked in debates over the significance of racism to American imperialism and in discussions of elite responses to the prospect of World War I.10 (Burgess was horrified at the idea of conflict between Anglo-Saxons and their Teutonic cousins, and he retrospectively described the U.S. declaration of war on Germany as “a grievous blow … my life’s work brought down in irretrievable ruin all about me.”)11 Until very recently, however, his ideas about race, Reconstruction, and imperialism have not been more than passingly explored in the historiography of political science or the discipline’s core concepts. That is, most considerations of Burgess’s role in formalizing the study of politics in the United States have treated his ideas about race and racial hierarchy as an unfortunate artifact of his times—a stain on his legacy and a problem for the contemporary relevance of his work, certainly, but little more.
However, this limits our understanding of Burgess and, more important, of how systematic political inquiry came to occupy a distinct academic field in the United States. The problem is not that recent commentators have been insufficiently indignant or embarrassed about Burgess’s racial ideology.12 It is, rather, that by failing to take it seriously as a fundamental aspect of his thought, we miss how his racial ideas shaped his political science and the vision for the discipline that he did so much to realize.
Burgess saw political progress as the expression of a racially specific national soul (which he called “the state”). From this perspective, national homogeneity and Anglo-Saxon (“Teutonic”) domination were necessary to American (and, by extension, civilization’s) advance. More generally, Burgess saw historical development, political sovereignty, and the possibility of democracy itself as determined in basic ways by racial inequality and difference. Burgess, his students, and his colleagues also invoked the seemingly scientific status of “race” to bolster the most basic claim to intellectual authority they made in this period. This was the idea that they were freeing political and historical theory from abstractions that they believed had previously dominated it and rooting it instead in objective science, practiced according to rigorous methods by credentialed professionals.
Scientific Politics and the Gilded Age “Crisis”
Before the Civil War, higher education existed in the United States primarily to train clergy and to hone the character and morals of young gentlemen of the upper classes. Advanced science and technical education became available with the founding of the Rensselaer School in 1824,13 and these fields saw rapid expansion in midcentury. But it was not until the decades after the Civil War and Reconstruction that anything like the modern, specialized, secular university appeared in the United States.14 Serious works of social and political analysis had certainly been produced before that period, and some were even by college professors. Particularly influential was the German immigrant scholar Francis Lieber, whose marriage of German historicism to a liberal, nationalist account of American history was carried forward in Burgess’s work.15 However, the social sciences as such—distinct, professional enterprises with identifiable institutional affiliations, specific barriers to entry, and aspirations to scientific status—only began to take shape in the United States in the late nineteenth century, with political science among the first to establish a home in the new university system.
For Thomas L. Haskell and Dorothy Ross, among others, the social sciences, the new universities, and the intellectual style associated with each of these were in significant ways products of “crisis,” brought about by the disruption and social ferment of the Civil War and its aftermath.16 For Haskell, the ideal of the academic as belonging to a specialized “community of the competent” was a response by the northeastern upper classes to a society that seemed increasingly disinclined to defer to its authority. For Ross, this period saw the dissolution of an elite consensus about the bases of knowledge and the course of American history, as science challenged theological authority and rapid change threatened comforting notions of America as an “exceptional” nation. On an institutional level, Stephen Skowronek sees the new universities as part of the “rise of the new American state” in this period, meant to create and rationalize a modern administrative apparatus in response to the realities of an industrialized, urban, and interconnected economy.17
The story of the institutionalization of political scholarship in the United States conforms to these largely complementary accounts. Although not born to the northeastern gentry, Burgess spent his professional life in institutions dominated by men of that group and even at times identified as a northerner.18 Certainly his anxiety about popular economic and political demands was palpable—so much so that Daniel Rodgers numbers Burgess among a cohort of new political and legal professionals in this period seeking to “wrest the language of political legitimacy away from the people” and put a “new set of constitutional limits” around their powers.19
In fact, Burgess’s politics were complicated, combining a commitment to nationalism with deep suspicion of active, centralized government. He thought that a homogeneous population and a strong judiciary were the keys to producing a robust and ordered polity without the incursions on liberty that would result from powerful democratic government. He was also deeply concerned that America might veer off its “true path … toward despotism on the one side or anarchy on the other.”20 To avert these catastrophic alternatives, political knowledge and governing practices had to be grounded in sound, scientific principles rather than a priori, philosophical speculation about natural rights or social contracts. Burgess’s scholarship and the School of Political Science he founded were explicitly dedicated to those purposes, and the impulses to rationalize politics and assert upper-class authority animated them both.
A case in point is civil service reform, the public cause with which Burgess and the School of Political Science were most visibly associated in the 1880s. Burgess originally envisioned the school as a training ground for public administrators and officials along the lines of the (then-private) École Libre des Sciences Politiques in Paris.21 Its graduates were to supply enlightened public servants to replace the machine bosses and patronage appointments controlling many of America’s government institutions at the time. When the school was launched in 1880, the Columbia newspaper published a cartoon captioned “True Civil Service Reform.” It depicted Burgess leading his colleagues