Chapter 3

Storm Centers of Political Theory and Practice

In 1924, Charles Merriam published “Recent Tendencies in Political Thought,” an essay on the state of the field. Today Merriam is considered one of the most important political scientists of the early twentieth century. In the essay, he argued that three epoch-making world processes were shaping contemporary political theory. The first was the further development of industrialism, which gave rise both to workers’ organizations and the penetration of the “backward states of the world,” which he also described as “the invasion of the tropical by the temperate zone.” The second was increasing contacts across race. Race problems “continued to be storm centers of political theory and practice.” Nationalism was in essence a “modified form of race expression.” The “harsh jangle of imperialism” was one important effect of these contacts. The other main consequence of race contact was the revival of the doctrine of self-determination, which “found abundant expression in political-racial propaganda and in military theory” in Europe and Japan and in the “movements for political autonomy” in India, South Africa, Egypt, and Ireland. The third process was the rise of feminism.¹

A young Raymond Leslie Buell ran headfirst into the maelstrom to preserve the white racial order. The battle in California to block Japanese immigrants from leasing land went back to a 1913 ban on property owning. Buell, then a PhD student in politics who had taken a position at Occidental College in 1920, wrote to his mentor Edward Corwin at Princeton for advice on teaching constitutional law and to report on his “stumping” in the Imperial Valley against the anti-leasing campaign. It turns out that Buell held a relatively moderate position in the debate on the best way to preserve white racial hegemony. So he also spoke “in favor of exclusion, which the Japs didn’t like,” and regretted being the only white on what was supposed to be a mixed-race committee (“was taken to a hotel and had breakfast, dinner and supper surrounded by the Yellow Peril—and no whites insight [sic].”). Yet he said that an evening paper in El Centro branded him a “renegade American” and “the American Legion threatened to tar and feather me.”²

Buell published articles on West Coast developments in a number of leading journals, although it was touch and go with the editors of the new Foreign Affairs.³ The trustees of financially strapped Clark University sold the Journal of Race Development/International Relations to the mix of millionaire lawyers, bankers, and professors who in 1921 had founded New York’s Council of Foreign Relations. The new editor, Archibald Cary Coolidge, Harvard’s first professor of Russian history and the mentor and close friend of Journal of Race Development/International Relations editor George Hubbard Blakeslee, had lobbied to keep the name in order to maintain the connection with “Blakeslee’s magazine.” When council leaders looked for a more sellable title, Coolidge came up with American Quarterly Review. Another Harvard man (the first dean of the Graduate School of Business Administration) and founding member, Edwin Gay, president of the New York Evening Post, said that American Review of Foreign Affairs was better, and the name was ultimately shortened to Foreign Affairs. When it came time to draw up a list of authors for the first issues, Coolidge turned to Blakeslee and others in the Cambridge-Worcester circuit; Harry Elmer Barnes wrote the first book reviews. Later a second Clark professor, William Langer, who had also worked as Coolidge’s assistant, took up the reviewer’s spot. Blakeslee himself joined the new editorial board. But the early decades of the journal are most closely associated today with another member of the Evening Post staff, Balkans expert and dedicated Wilsonian Hamilton Fish Armstrong, who joined as managing editor under Coolidge and then as editor for forty years after Coolidge’s death.⁴

Armstrong at first did not think much of Buell, a young colleague of Coolidge at Harvard, where he had started as a tutor in history, government, and economics in 1922. Armstrong voted to turn down Buell’s first piece on the new oil imperialism, he told Coolidge, since Buell obviously “was not used to writing.” After Coolidge corrected the misperception—Buell “has been turning out books on all sorts of subjects with startling rapidity”—Armstrong tried to reject the next one on the grounds that he wrote too much.⁵ But Foreign Affairs ran his “Again the Yellow Peril” in 1923, and by the end of that decade Buell had become its most frequent contributor (with the exception of Armstrong himself). Buell wrote on the Opium Conference in 1925, produced two essays on the impact of white rule in Africa in 1927 and 1928, and an essay on the problem of governing mixed-race colonies more generally in 1929.

By then, Buell had abandoned full-time teaching to direct the research program of the New York-based, mass-member, progressive alternative to the Council of Foreign Relations, the Foreign Policy Association. The association had grown out of a small study group, the Committee on American Policy in International Relations, which began meeting in the summer of 1918. Charles Beard (1874–1948) designed the syllabus. Beard, the best-known historian of the first half of the twentieth century and future president of both the American Political Science Association and the American Historical Association, had just resigned his Columbia position in protest of its control by reactionary trustees. The course focused on the nature and extent of future racial antagonisms, control of international waterways, the status of backward countries, control of natural resources, the place of nationality in world organizations, and, finally, the idea of a league of nations.⁶ By the end of that year its members had launched the grassroots education campaign as the League of Free Nations Association, and after the debacle over U.S. membership in the League of Nations, it continued its educational efforts as the Foreign Policy Association.⁷ By the mid-1920s a research department had been set up and the first of many local branch organizations were built; we now know them as the World Affairs Councils of America. As research director and president of the Foreign Policy Association after 1933, Buell would become one of the most recognized and influential political scientists writing on international affairs during the interwar years.⁸

Buell’s controversial 1923 article “Again the Yellow Peril” came out as an increasingly powerful immigration restriction movement launched the campaign that would culminate in the National Origins Act of 1924.⁹ Its leaders sought further, permanent cuts in the numbers of “alien” white stocks (Jews, Greeks, Italians, etc.) being admitted into the country and a total ban on admission of nonwhites from “Asiatic countries”; that is, the Japanese.¹⁰ Buell warned that it was dangerous to seek Japanese exclusion by legislative fiat because it would needlessly provoke a foreign power in ways that were likely to harm U.S. interests.

His warning proved correct. Anti-American demonstrations, including a rash of suicides, rocked Japan after the 1924 law was passed, and the Japanese government protested the failure to treat Japan equally.¹² Buell would thus be slotted today among those on the losing side of the immigration debate who had taken relatively “egalitarian” and “antidiscriminatory” positions, on “the principle,” as Buell put it, “that the segregation of races of different color is necessary, as far as laboring masses are concerned, not because of racial inferiority but because of racial difference.”¹³

False Prophecies of the White World Order’s End

All accounts of the winning side in the scramble to build an impregnable biological fortress around the native Americans (meaning the Teutonic or Nordic or Anglo-Saxon “race” or “blood” or “stock,” depending on the particular analytical framework used) recognize the influence of Madison Grant, author of the best-selling Passing of the Great Race (1916), and his “protégé, T. Lothrop Stoddard. Grant wrote the introduction to Stoddard’s own most famous book, The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat against White World Supremacy (1920), which made him the leading apostle of Nordic racial supremacy in the United States. Their notoriety was such that F. Scott Fitzgerald created a composite, “this man Goddard,” author of The Rise of the Colored Empire, who impresses Tom Buchanan early in The Great Gatsby. “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”¹⁴

No one now bothers to note that Stoddard had been the protégé first of Archibald Cary Coolidge, who had come up with Stoddard’s dissertation topic on the impact of the French revolution on Santo Domingo and inspired his subsequent turn to writing full-time about international relations.¹⁵ Stoddard’s writing career had an impressive start. He published the dissertation in 1914 for general readers, although specialists embraced it as the first scholarly study in English on the topic. Stoddard proposed it as a parable for the race wars to come. The slave revolt on the island was “the first great shock between the ideals of white supremacy and race equality” and culminated in “the tragedy of the annihilation of the white population,” when “the black state of Haiti [made] its appearance in the world’s history.”¹⁶ The course of dollar diplomacy there under President Taft and Secretary of State Philander Knox a century later launched Stoddard’s career as commentator on contemporary world affairs, while the occupations of Haiti in 1915 and the Dominican Republic in 1916 boosted sales of his first book. He wrote, “In fine, Santo Domingo’s only hope seems to lie in prolonged tutelage to some foreign power which will assure such conditions of order and good government as will permit the development of the country’s splendid natural resources and implant the fabric of civilization.”¹⁷

Stoddard started pumping out pieces at an astounding pace, including two more books and half a dozen articles on Europe in the war, and he ranged far beyond the Nordic/Alpine/Mediterranean racial borders. His 1917 article in the American Political Science Review introduced the distinction between “blood race” and “thought race” that he derived from the European case, where people believed they were Teutons, Latins, Anglo-Saxons, and Slavs, races that did not in fact exist, fighting a war that was not a true race war but a “domestic struggle between…blood-relatives.” He then applied his model to the second imagined racial stage of nationalism in the “Mohammedan world,” as was seen in the movements that championed pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, and pan-Turanism.¹⁸ His shining moment came with the publication of a trio of books outlining the dismal prospects for the future of white world supremacy, including the best seller The Rising Tide of Color (1920), The New World of Islam (1921) and Revolt against Civilization (1922). He continued to turn them out, in fact.¹⁹ The controversy surrounding the first, especially in the pages of the liberal journals of opinion The Nation and The New Republic, was such that respectful reviews of subsequent books began by reassuring readers that there was nothing alarmist about them.²⁰ The controversy paid handsome dividends, such that by the time his old advisor took up the editorship of Foreign Affairs, he couldn’t afford the price Stoddard was commanding.²¹

Little wonder. The largest circulation magazine in the country, The Saturday Evening Post, had exposed millions to Grant and Stoddard’s ideas.²² Many other influential publications and specialists in world politics lauded The Rising Tide of Color.²³

When newly elected president Warren G. Harding told a crowd of 100,000 “whites and colored people” in Birmingham in October 1921 that “our race problem here in the United States is only a phase of a race issue that the whole world confronts,” he cited Stoddard’s study. He also evoked a second authority on the world race problem, Lord Lugard, the onetime governor general of Nigeria who was serving as British representative on the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission. Lugard’s ideas about Africa held lessons for the South, Harding said, where political and economic rights might gradually be extended but “social equality” was clearly impossible given the “fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference” between the races.²⁴ Raymond Leslie Buell came to the same conclusion after traveling to South Africa in 1926, where the Herzog government had sought to create a system of black communal councils while preserving white power in the national Parliament.²⁵

Stoddard later shifted his views in line with the distinction Buell and many others had started to make between “superiority” and “difference” as the grounds for immigrant exclusion and for what Stoddard called “bi-racialism” as the solution to the “negro problem.”²⁶ His critics unfortunately do not discuss the development of his ideas past 1924 or so, a point that he underscored in his unpublished autobiography. The conventional accounts handed down to us reflect this static view. Elihu Root, Theodore Roosevelt, and several others wrote to Stoddard privately approving the shift.²⁷ His influence did not depend on his change of view—far from it. After Rising Tide was published, Carl Kelsey—the editor of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science who had criticized Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk two decades earlier—reached out to Stoddard for his understanding of “the growing significance of race relationships” as he planned the new issue on immigration reform.²⁸ Stoddard lectured widely and testified before Congress on the necessity of closing the country’s borders. The point is that although Stoddard might have been a lightning rod for critics, little really distinguished his views from those of many white scholars, policy makers, and public intellectuals.

Stoddard developed his ideas about biracialism in Re-Forging America (1927), a historical account of America’s race development that radically revised his notorious view of inevitable Nordic decline. Two critical junctures had shaped the course of American race development, he argued. He dated the first to 1787, the year of the Constitutional Convention that would give Congress the power to outlaw the slave trade twenty years hence and the year the new federal government passed the Northwest Ordinance, which prohibited slavery in the new western dependencies. As a result, America remained “a white man’s country,” having averted “the ominous shadow from Africa,” which might have left the South resembling the West Indies with a “limitless horde of negro slaves,” and a total U.S. population that was one-third to one-half black.²⁹ The threat slavery posed to national race development persisted, however. It led to the “supreme disaster of American history,” the Civil War. Stoddard’s account underscored the relentless racial impoverishment, political corruption, orgy of materialism, slum building, and radical ideologies that followed Reconstruction in the South and the alien flood in the East and West before the second “great turning point in America’s racial destiny,” the passage of the 1924 immigration act. The just-in-time closing of the floodgates made it possible to imagine assimilating the high-grade new aliens and, over the longer term, most of the low-grade ones.³⁰

Nonwhites, however, constituted a special problem, and defense of “white integrity” or the color line drove Stoddard to propose the “experiment” that he called biracialism. In essence, he wanted to deepen, regularize, ostensibly upgrade, and extend the South’s “separate but equal” Jim Crow order to the country as a whole. “Under a perfected bi-racial system, the line separating the races would be straight and logical,” he argued. So, for example, all sexual contact across racial groups would be outlawed everywhere instead of in the piecemeal fashion found in the laws of dozens of cities and states. Disfranchisement, the single biggest obstacle to a fair and just segregated order, would be eliminated over time through a “curial system” that assigned blacks a fixed proportion of local offices and legislative seats: “Thereafter, the negroes could divide into parties, enjoy all the thrills of political campaigning, and get as much political experience as their white fellow citizens, without in the least changing the ration of white and colored office-holders and legislators.”³¹

Biracialism might work, he said, and thus possibly “exorcise the dread spectre of race-war.” Northern black radicals posed the main obstacle to its implementation. They were frequently mulatto and for that reason were particularly susceptible to “doctrines of racial equality and amalgamation.” He singled out W. E. B. Du Bois as “a good example. Doctor Dubois [sic] is a light mulatto, and he typifies the intense resentment felt by such persons at the color-line which debars them from full incorporation with the white race.” Du Bois’s brand of radicalism hadn’t mattered very much until the war years, when, because of immigration restrictions, demand for “native labor” had pulled southern blacks into northern cities and factories. Growing frictions in the North and in the military because of the drafting of black men who had tasted freedom in France had led ultimately to “a racial crisis throughout America,” marked by urban riots and rural revolts. Foreign-born Afro-Caribbean “firebrands” were a second radical stream that preached violence and hatred, he claimed.³²

Stoddard ultimately hedged his bets. Biracialism offered a compromise program. If black radicals continued to propagandize unrealistically for the dismantling of the color line, which meant turning “white America” into “mulatto America,” then “colonization should…be seriously pondered” as another “possible solution.”³³

Private letters of praise for his latest analytical triumph poured in. His sometime critic, Edward A. Ross, the Wisconsin sociologist and past president of the ASA, who more than twenty years earlier had warned of impending white race suicide, wrote to commend Stoddard for the best dissection of “de-Americanization” he had ever seen. Future Supreme Court justice and Alabama Klan member Hugo Black, who had just won a U.S. senate seat, said that every loyal American ought to support Stoddard’s white unity program. The University of Oklahoma’s Jerome Dowd, who defined his scholarly project as the “sociological study of mankind from the standpoint of race,” had just published his Negro in American Life (1926). He had stumbled over the issue of how to preserve white domination while securing civil rights for blacks as they slowly developed out of their childlike state.³⁴ Stoddard had shown the way with his proposed curial model.³⁵

The white world’s two flagship international affairs quarterlies, Foreign Affairs and the Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, both reviewed Re-Forging America. William Langer, who had just moved from Clark’s international relations department to Harvard and turned out hundreds of one-line reviews for Foreign Affairs—this one under the heading international relations of the United States—concluded that it presented “a rather lurid picture of present day America, with a suggested solution for our race problem.” The editor of the Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs gave it a longer and more respectable notice that concluded, “An extremely interesting book on what is the most important problem to-day, not only in the United States, but also, indirectly, in Europe.” In the longest review in Economic Geography, Carleton P. Barnes, who was finishing his PhD at Clark, at the time a citadel of environmental determinism, called its historical account argumentative but convincing and its appraisal of the racial problem excellent.³⁶ The only serious criticisms of the South-as-South Africa parable came from those whose reasoned arguments for “natural rights” and equality were dismissed as “madness.”

New World Negroes

This rising tide of scientific racism in the 1920s that undergirded popular and scholarly accounts of international relations reflected the “apprehension of imminent loss” among the political classes of “white men’s countries” in an era of increasing mobility and mobilization of colored peoples. This is the argument that historians Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds say Du Bois began to develop in “Souls of White Folk,” which was published in 1910, but that claim is not quite correct.³⁷ They follow the convention of tracing “Souls of White Folk,” published in Darkwater, back to the short four-page essay with the same title in The Independent (August 18, 1910), but the greatly expanded text, including its trenchant analysis of the Great War, explication of the role racism plays in imperialism, and prediction of the coming “fight for freedom” across the colonies and semi-colonies of Asia and Africa, is actually from “The Culture of White Folk,” which was published in the Journal of Race Development in 1917.

As they also show at great length, by 1924 the governments of the United States, New Zealand, and Canada had followed the “White Australia policy” of implementing or tightening anti-Asian immigration restrictions. Meanwhile, in South Africa, a country that Jan Smuts, its first postwar prime minister, contrasted with the other white dominions—the laws in his country “had never recognized any system of equality”—he and his comrades consolidated the white supremacist order. These are all the same states that “bandwagoned” to defeat the Japanese proposed racial equality clause at Versailles in 1919.

Mark Mazower’s brilliant account of the imperial template for the League of Nations recovers the essential role played by South Africa’s leader Jan Smuts and, not least, the objective of securing white leadership through its design.³⁸ Du Bois, for one, had noticed, in his 1925 Foreign Affairs article “Worlds of Color,” an account of colonialism on the ground in Africa at the dawn of the mandate era. “Jan Smuts is today, in his world aspects, the greatest protagonist of the white race,” dedicated to “the continued and eternal subordination of black to white in Africa.”³⁹

Locke replaced the slighter essay, “The Black Man Brings His Gifts,” by Du Bois in the famous “Harlem number” (as the magazine version of The New Negro was known) with “Worlds of Color,” which appeared as the final chapter in the expanded New Negro.⁴⁰ This was Locke’s response to a postwar order that had grudgingly recognized the “civilized qualities” of some states and dependencies—Poland, Ireland, Egypt, Iraq—while judging black people barbarians incapable of ever governing themselves.⁴¹ These were the “little nations that were weak and white” in Claude McKay’s poem, “The Little Peoples,” set free by the “big men of the world,” while “blacks / less than trampled dust…Must still be offered up as sacrifice.”⁴² Locke wrote, “We are now presenting the New Negro in a national and even international scope…. As in India, in China, in Egypt, Ireland, Russia, Bohemia, Palestine and Mexico, we are witnessing the resurgence of a people.”⁴³ For Locke, Harlem was a paradigmatic instance of the phenomenon of race development in international relations. His biographers distance themselves from the concept; race development appears in scare quotes all three times they refer to it.⁴⁴

Locke’s framing of Harlem as part of a world movement nonetheless draws attention to specific pages in the introductory essay, “The New Negro,” which was stitched together from two separate texts in the special number, “Harlem” and “Enter the New Negro.” Harlem, with a population of Africans, West Indians, and African Americans that had grown from 2,000 to 200,000 in the space of a single decade, was “the largest Negro community in the world,” a “race capital” with “the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin has had for the New Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia.”⁴⁵ Not only was the era of tutelage over for “the Northern centers” of the race, but Harlem was the center of a “new internationalism,” the home of the “Negro’s ‘Zionism.” It was where the “pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat.” The new “enlarged” race consciousness, which had been egregiously misrepresented by the fear-mongering “rising tide of color” school, was a consciousness “of acting as advance guard of the African peoples” and “of a mission of rehabilitating the race in world esteem from that loss of prestige for which the fate and conditions of slavery have so largely been responsible.”⁴⁶ The New Negro circulated widely and established Locke’s intellectual reputation across the Black Atlantic.⁴⁷

Both Alain Locke and W. E. B. Du Bois took on Stoddard and his biracialism thesis, multiple times in Du Bois’s case.⁴⁸ The Locke-Stoddard exchange appeared under the title “Should the Negro Be Encouraged to Cultural Equality?” in the October 1927 issue of The Forum, a New York monthly that regularly featured clashing views on the great issues of the day. Locke led off with “The High Cost of Prejudice.” Whites in the United States faced a fundamental “social dilemma and self-contradiction” between their commitment to democracy, or what he called their “social creed,” and their unremitting oppression of black people. Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal made the same argument, using many of the same terms, twenty years later in An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy.

The white majority’s shortsightedness—the “pathetic delusion that it can negate what it denies”—would give way sooner or later. The decision not to implement a program of gradual emancipation in the nineteenth century produced a cataclysm that forced the issue. In analogous fashion, whites could still “retard” further change, “but only at general social or net loss.” What Locke called “recognition” rather than “denial of equality” and “the scrapping of White Supremacy” might proceed without the waste of talent and diversion of energies, but either way, black “efforts will still go forward almost as fast.” Recognition would come in the court of world opinion since ideas are not subject to embargo.” The main danger in delay was the likelihood that the next (post–New Negro) generation would turn to violence out of frustration. “Race war? Not exactly. Class war, more likely,—with the Negro group temper profoundly changed from its present patient amiability to social desperation, having in its ultimate disillusionment discovered that it has so little to lose.”⁴⁹

If Locke’s piece anticipates what Rogers Smith calls the liberal tradition that is associated with Myrdal and with Louis Hartz, with its emphasis on the “American creed,” then Stoddard’s response in Forum is a pitch-perfect performance of the competing ethnonational or “ascriptive American” tradition.⁵⁰ What Smith means in plain language is white supremacy. For Stoddard, full “political and social equality” for black people in America was an “illusion” and, thus, by definition, so was the American creed. “We know that our America is a White America.” “White America will not abolish the color-line, will not admit the Negro to social equality, will not open to door to racial amalgamation…. If this spells trouble, then trouble there must be.” Blacks in the South had accepted biracialism and prospered under it. Locke and other militant northern black intelligentsia who were making “intransigent demands” were “deluding themselves” if they thought they might gain white acceptance by “disproving the charge of racial inferiority,” since “White America’s attitude and policy toward the Negro is,—not a belief in the Negro’s inferiority,—but the fact of his difference.” Yet in the very next sentence Stoddard revealed his late adoption of the difference (not inferiority) idea to be a distinction without a difference. “True[,] most Whites to-day believe the Negro to be their inferior…from realization of racial difference and all that that connotes.” Stoddard felt compelled to remind Locke of the most “cherished” of Americans’ inalienable rights, the “right to their racial heritage.”⁵¹

Du Bois’s first engagement with Stoddard had taken place two years earlier in 1925 at the Labor Temple School in Manhattan, which held regular evening lectures organized by its director, Will Durant, who later wrote the multivolume Story of Civilization. The two sparred again in a radio debate that was broadcast from New York in September 1927, just before publication of the Locke-Stoddard debate in Forum. Du Bois’s biographer, David Levering Lewis, says that word of his triumph against the apostle of racism spread far beyond the salons of the “Talented Tenth,” or black intellectuals. In private, Madison Grant told his protégé that it was shameful that such a debate had to take place at all. “To have educated such Negroes as Locke and Du Boise [sic] was a crime and Harvard and Boston and Massachusetts are all suffering the retribution for their emotional sentimentalism in the last century.”⁵²

Before a packed crowd at the city’s premier boxing arena, the Chicago Coliseum, Du Bois debated Stoddard a third and final time in March 1929. This time his defense of black people’s rights to equality against Stoddard’s biracial regime led him to pound on the sick heart of white America’s fantasy of racial purity and the threat of miscegenation. It was the so-called Nordics whose project had “broken down native family life, desecrated the homes of weaker peoples and spread their bastards to every corner of land and sea.” Yet Stoddard and his ilk would now draw the line: “You shall not marry our daughters!” Du Bois hissed in reply, “Who in Hell asked to marry your daughters?” The headline of the next day’s Chicago Defender read “Du Bois Shattered Stoddard’s Cultural Theories.”⁵³