Preface

This book has its origins in a cold, gray December afternoon in Worcester, Massachusetts, as I wandered through Clark University’s Goddard Library. During its founding decades, Clark was at the forefront of the development of graduate education in the United States, but those days are long gone. I was teaching International Relations there in the early 1990s and working hard to avoid my students’ final papers when I pulled William Koelsch’s history of the school off the stacks. In the section discussing Clark’s signal contributions to early twentieth-century social science, Koelsch credited psychologist G. Stanley Hall and historian (and, after 1915, professor of history and international relations) George Hubbard Blakeslee with starting the discipline’s first specialized journal, the Journal of Race Development, in 1910, which the editors renamed the Journal of International Relations in 1919.¹

This can’t be correct, I thought. Everyone in the field understands that the new post-Versailles internationalist think tanks—the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York—rolled out the field’s first journals in the mid-1920s. Koelsch, though, was in fact right. My eye-opening reeducation began with the brittle pages of the twelve bound volumes of the forgotten journal and, from there, the Blakeslee Papers at Clark and the Hamilton Fish Armstrong Papers at Princeton University. These records let me piece together the story of the sale of “Blakeslee’s magazine” to the Council on Foreign Relations, relaunched with its new, they hoped, punchier title, Foreign Affairs.

It took some time for this more accurate story of the origins of the field of International Relations to circulate. I began giving papers at conferences on the early history in 1998 and published the first version in 2002.² I also contacted the digital repository JSTOR proposing that they make the journal available. I was told that the digitization and dissemination of the Journal of Race Development was not in the cards, although I was not told why. Nonetheless, it is available today with a link to its successors. The early volumes can also be downloaded from the Internet Archive. A Wikipedia entry now exists as well. Foreign Affairs, though, has not yet amended the brief history on its Web site that William Bundy wrote in 1994.³ Blakeslee’s signal contribution is not referenced there.

Despite this historical amnesia, the journal matters because of what it tells us about the constitutive role of imperialism and racism in bringing an academic discipline in the United States into existence. The evidence of the racist foundations of International Relations grew overwhelming as I continued my investigation. My archival research included the private papers of long-forgotten faculty in Cambridge, Chicago, Madison, New York, Princeton, and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and extended to the records of foundations and the many white (of course never identified as such) internationalist associations, institutes, research centers, and schools that the Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Corporation subsidized in the early decades of the twentieth century. Suffice it to say that the history I uncovered is not how practitioners understand the past of their profession—far from it. It is not the inspiring kind of story that Americans prefer to hear about themselves.

The discovery of the first journal opened my eyes in a second, much more personal and consequential sense. Hall and Blakeslee had invited W. E. B. Du Bois, the giant of twentieth-century thought, or so I came to view him, to join as a founding member of the editorial board. Du Bois published two essays in the Journal of Race Development, including most of what became “Souls of White Folk,” the most powerful chapter in his incendiary Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920). Foreign Affairs published him five more times in the next decades before the government began its persecution of the 83-year-old firebrand and alleged subversive.⁴ I wondered how had I gone through college and a PhD program in political science and not read him, and I resolved to make up for lost time.

Encountering Du Bois for the first time at age 40—around the time I was promoted to associate professor—influenced the direction of my research but also changed what I would do in the classroom. My retraining began with teaching a course on Du Bois in global perspective with Clark historian Janette Greenwood. Team teaching the undergraduate seminar was a way of learning on the run, which left me wanting to study Du Bois and the thought of other African American thinkers in more depth. So I took a year off from teaching and from research on the Middle East, my ostensible area of specialization, to study African American social and intellectual history with Nell Painter and Kevin Gaines (both then at Princeton) and the history of the “science” of race with Adolph Reed Jr. (then at the New School of Social Research and now a colleague at the University of Pennsylvania.) Subsequently I began reading the published works and private papers—at UCLA, the Library of Congress, and most crucially at Howard University—of the African Americans who were most engaged, together with the towering Du Bois, in the debates in the field of U.S. international relations in the first half of the twentieth century. Ultimately, that research transformed my understanding of the history and sociology of the discipline.

The African American scholars and the dissections of racism’s role in the global imperial order have disappeared from the histories that the vast majority of professors of international relations in the United States tell about themselves and their work today. They view the past the way I once did, with a similar set of blinders. It is thus no surprise that many see and know of no connection between the practices of hierarchy and the field of international relations in the United States. The evidence, on many accounts, is just not there.

In a first-year graduate methods course in the social sciences, students learn to think in terms of a null hypothesis; that is, the default idea that no relationship exists between two phenomena. The central task for the social scientist is to use inferential statistics to establish the grounds for rejecting or disproving the null hypothesis. Multiple times in the course of justifying this project to peers in the profession I was told that black thinkers, beginning with Du Bois, aren’t taught in international relations courses because none wrote anything of importance to it. In the chapters that follow, I marshal the archival evidence that forces us to reject that idea—the null hypothesis, in this case—as false, just as it has been rejected in discipline after discipline in the United States in the wake of the black studies revolution that has rewritten the intellectual and social history of the academic professions and of the wider world beyond.