Race and the Making of American Political Science. Jessica Blatt
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imagery was apt. Like many reformers, proponents of civil service reform were class warriors of a sort, seeking to displace corrupt mass politics with administration by what Burgess’s one-time student Richard T. Ely called “a natural aristocracy” drawn from respectable society and educated in enlightened governance. This group alone, Burgess agreed, possessed the “intelligence, skill and fidelity” to competently identify and carry out the common weal.23
Moreover, again as with much of the Gilded Age and Progressive reform tradition, this class politics was bound up with racial ideology.24 White elites had mostly looked with horror at the black-led administrations of the Reconstruction South and many saw depoliticizing government functions as a hedge against the consequences of black suffrage.25 Similarly, despite the fact that political machines long predated the “new” immigration of the late nineteenth century, these things were conflated in the minds of many reformers. As a result, the arguments for civil service reform were often made in explicitly racialized and anti-immigrant terms. James Bryce, an eminent British politician and student of American politics,26 argued that political machines existed because of the “ignorant and pliable voters” supplied by the recent wave of immigration, which brought “primitive people, such as the South Italian peasants,” suited only to “quasi-feudal relationships.”27 A civil service chosen on merit and by exam would eliminate the patronage that greased the machine’s gears, reducing corruption and, with it, any incentive for these groups to interest themselves in political life. Burgess, likewise, saw any participation in government of non-Teutonic people as a recipe for “corruption and confusion,” since only “the Teuton” possessed a “superior political genius.” That is, not even all white men could be counted among the custodians of “the welfare of mankind.” Rather, that role was to fall to the best men of “Teutonic” or “Aryan” stock, elite members of what he called “the political nations par excellence.”28
Burgess’s vision of a school for enlightened public service proved premature. While Burgess was optimistic that the school might “place its students in immediate connection with the Civil Service examinations, so far as they now exist” and also “exert its influence … for the extension of same,” the committee charged with evaluating his proposal was skeptical. They endorsed his plan in substance, but noted that it was unlikely that “the possession of superior qualifications will necessarily afford the aspirant … any very substantial … advantage.” Still, they agreed with Burgess that “a class of men better prepared in the principles” of political economy, politics, law, and history than were “most of those who control the destinies of our people at this time” was “greatly wanted.”29
As it turns out, the committee had the right side of the argument, at least in the short term. The Pendleton Act, which had aimed to depoliticize the civil service, covered only 10 percent of government jobs when it was passed in 1883, and that percentage was to rise only gradually for several years. As a result, the immediate demand for graduates of the Columbia School of Political Science was to come less from government institutions than from colleges and universities, as institutions of higher education expanded their enrollments and the doctoral degree came to be sine qua non for professors. Nonetheless, this case lends support to the argument that the university project was bound up with concerns about the transformation of old hierarchies. Similarly, it bears out Skowronek’s linkage of universities to the rise of modern administrative practices—if not as a response to state demand for personnel and expertise, then as a site for ideological and political organization, as well as what today’s schools of management and administration would call “capacity building.” It also hints at the ways in which the university model was shaped by racial ideas and anxieties circulating in its infancy.
While Burgess’s school may have done little to reform American government institutions in the short term, it did much to transform the study of politics, creating a new set of homegrown credentials and a shared, scientific language. Confronted with the economic upheaval, demographic shifts, labor conflict, and radical movements of the Gilded Age, the political professionals at Columbia sought to keep the “reins of government” in the right hands. “Humanitarian outbursts,” the narrow interest claims of everyday democratic practice, and majoritarian rule alike were inadequate to the challenges of the moment. Burgess and his colleagues sought to meet them with stronger stuff. A central component of this was to be a sound account of human difference.
The “Most Serious and Delicate Task”
The rapid pace of immigration lent urgency to this effort. Like many American intellectuals in this period, however, Burgess and his students were primarily concerned with coming to terms with the country’s—and their—recent past. It was a past that seemed to call for a radical rethinking of American political life. The democratic experiment had not been meant to erupt in a bloody conflagration. Nor did the rapidly expanding and often ruinously volatile economy of the post–Civil War era fit the picture of the sturdy producers’ republic that previous theory had painted. The faith of the founders seemed “absurdly obsolete” and replacing it would require understanding the causes and consequences of the war.30
Burgess’s political science was committed to this project. For him, the “most serious and delicate task in literature and morals” was to write the history of the United States from 1816 through the outbreak of the Civil War. A new and correct understanding of this period was to his mind the key to developing a “national opinion upon the fundamental principles of our polity” and to beginning to settle political questions on the “merits” rather than through the lenses of sectional prejudice.31 Burgess also had a personal stake in coming to terms with the conflict and in reconciling Northern and Southern perspectives. Born in 1844 to a slave-holding, Unionist family in Tennessee, and spending his adult life among the Northeastern elite, he more than once characterized his life’s work as a response to his firsthand experiences of the Civil War and the (to his mind) catastrophic experiment in racial equality that followed it.
Burgess retrospectively described his Civil War experiences in terms of persecution, exile, and finally revelation. According to his 1934 memoir, he was driven from his home as a teenager by thuggish, secessionist “freelances” who “took this occasion to wreak their vengeance upon their unionist neighbors for every personal grudge which existed between them, as well as for political differences.” Threatened with conscription into Confederate forces, he was forced to flee on a half-hour’s notice, under cover of darkness and alone save for “a beautiful mare” that his father had “ordered … a negro” to prepare for him. After a grueling journey (the horse didn’t make it), he reached Federal lines and volunteered as a scout for the Union Army, painfully aware that he would be executed as a traitor if Confederate forces captured him.32
It was during this “frightful experience” that he divined “the first suggestion” of his future calling. His memoir recounts a night of sentinel duty, overlooking the aftermath of a battle and straining his “eyes to peer into the darkness” and his “ears to perceive the first sounds of an approaching enemy”: “I found myself murmuring to myself: ‘Is it not possible for man, a being of reason, created in the image of God, to solve the problems of his existence by the power of reason and without recourse to the destructive means of physical violence?’ And I then registered the vow in heaven that if a kind of Providence would deliver me alive from the perils of the existing war, I would devote my life to teaching men how to live by reason and compromise instead of by bloodshed and destruction.”33
Deliverance came not long after, in the form of a discharge followed by a northward journey to take up undergraduate studies at Amherst College. At Amherst, Burgess met the Hegelian philosopher Julius Seelye, whom Burgess described as “the man for whom I had been all my previous life looking.” Seelye taught him that universal reason was the “substance of all things” and that “it was the duty of man and the purpose of his existence to bring the precepts of reason to consciousness and … embody them in … thought and conduct, law and policy.”34
Only a handful of doctoral programs existed in the United States at the time, and they were restricted to the natural sciences. For an advanced degree in any other field,