Part II
Worlds of Color
Raymond Leslie Buell, a 29-year-old instructor in comparative colonial administration at Harvard, wrote to Howard University’s Alain Locke on May 23, 1925, at the urging of Herald Tribune book critic Lewis Gannett. The ambitious Buell already had two books in print. He published his first one on French party politics when he was just out of the army and before beginning work on his MA. When he published his second book, on the Washington (arms control) Conference, which took aim at Japanese imperialism, Princeton’s department of history and politics awarded him a PhD. Henry Holt and Company was about to come out with his third book, the over-700-page International Relations.
Buell’s advisor at Princeton and friend, Edward S. Corwin, the great legal scholar and associate of Woodrow Wilson, had wanted a textbook on modern colonial politics for his new American political science series, but Buell instead proposed that he write a book that situated problems of colonial administration within a broader framework of nationalism, internationalism, and imperialism. In International Relations he turned to the new political science—“where international law leaves off”—to explain the increasing tensions between the world’s lighter- and darker-skinned peoples.1 Harry Elmer Barnes, an apostle of the “new history,” called the approach “revolutionary” in his review in the New Republic.2 With the international relations book finished, Buell headed to Africa to deepen his understanding of race contact and conflict in ways that might contribute to solving the so-called Negro problem.
Buell was the first political scientist in the United States to do fieldwork in any of the various African colonies or in South Africa. The trip resulted in The Native Problem in Africa (1928), which is still referred to today. He was hoping for Alain Locke’s help with contacts among “native leaders.” Locke, who had begun teaching and writing on interracial relations after attending the Universal Races Congress in 1911, had just published the work for which he is best known, a special issue of the Survey Graphic titled “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro,” which Buell had read and admired.3
The Harlem number and the book that followed five months later, The New Negro, established Locke’s importance not only to what came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance but also to the modern study of the art, literature, and thought of African, Afro-American, and Afro-Caribbean peoples. Reaching out to Locke thus made great sense. The 40-year-old philosophy professor had added the study of African art to his bulging portfolio of projects and had journeyed to Egypt and Sudan in 1923. That trip in turn led to his meeting in 1924 with Ethiopian regent Ras (or prince) Tafari Makonnen (who was crowned king in 1928 and became Emperor Haile Selassie I in 1930).4 The New Negro included images of African sculptures from the new Barnes Foundation in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, along with Locke’s own first essay on the subject.5
Locke was then one of the few American intellectuals writing on Africa to have actually set foot on the continent. W. E. B. Du Bois, then 55, traveled there for the first time a few months after Locke. Melville Herskovits, who is routinely described now as “father” of African studies, did the research for his 1923 Columbia PhD on cattle complexes in East Africa in libraries rather than in the field. The new project on cross-race mixtures measured skull sizes of American Negroes, including, famously, students from Howard University, where Locke had helped arrange a visiting position in 1925.6 Locke was also urging African Americans to pay serious attention to political developments in Africa, especially to the operation of the League of Nations mandate system, an institution of growing interest to Buell for its promise of improved conditions for colored subject peoples.7
Buell, who was arguably the most prolific student of international relations in the 1920s and 1930s, has long been forgotten by the many generations of political scientists that followed in his footsteps, although some in Africana studies still discuss him. While a dozen schools, societies, awards, and so forth across the United States were named to honor Locke, he has never been considered as someone who was critically engaged with the ideas that defined the study of international relations in the United States in the 1920s, a decade marked by new theorizing on imperialism, the challenge to white supremacy, and the prospects of race war. Buell’s International Relations, a popular college textbook, explains the fundamental cause of and most pressing problems of the contemporary world order, namely, the “restless energy of Caucasian people” in their “search for new markets” and “demand for cheap labor.” “Complex interdependence,” the shorthand phrase he developed to characterize the world order Caucasians constructed and the accelerated extent and pace of interactions among races, is still used by his disciplinary descendants today, although they think of it as something new, different, and more sophisticated than the concept as Buell defined it.
Two great political problems have arisen out of the contact of the white with the colored races: 1 the problems which have resulted from the extension of the white man’s rule to countries inhabited by non-whites—the problems of imperialism; 2 the problem of discrimination against non-whites who have entered or who wish to enter the white man’s country.8
In other words, the chief complexity that underpinned the idea of complex interdependence was the creation of the “racial problem” that led to fierce debates about the causes of war, the future racial balance of power, and the increased likelihood of violent conflict across the color line.9
Ultimately, the assumptions that undergirded the discipline-in-formation showed little alteration from the decades of the founding of the American Political Science Association in 1903 and the Journal of Race Development in 1910 (after 1919, the Journal of International Relations) and the years of World War I through the 1920s.10 That is, academics continued to think both in terms of territorial and phenotypical units of analysis and of “anthropogeographical” boundaries.11 Buell’s textbook, which surveyed developments in California and the Pacific coast of Canada and in the settler colonies of Kenya, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia, included a discussion of the necessity of segregating white and nonwhite peoples. He reduced the “level of analysis” (systemic, domestic, and individual-level variables), as we say now, to focus on the threat interracial marriages posed; they would create “a hybrid population which would have great difficulty in perpetuating the characteristics of either a white or non-white civilization.”12
If more evidence is needed that the boundaries that defined the professional study of international relations a century ago are not precisely those that preoccupy political scientists today, then consider the founding in 1923 of the Harvard Bureau of International Research. The initial five-year grant of $250,000 (the equivalent of more than $5 million today) from the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Memorial to support research by Harvard faculty “of an international character in the social sciences” paid for Buell’s fieldwork in Africa. The funds also supported anthropologist Ernest Hooten’s study of prisoners in U.S. jails. Hooten had called for the country to do more “biological housecleaning” after the passage of the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act. The grant also supported a project on mulattos in the United States by Hooten’s colleague, Alfred Tozzer.13
In American international relations, the epoch-defining world war and the upheavals that followed across Europe, Asia, and the United States basically confirmed the robustness of the imperialism and interracial conflict frameworks of the previous decade and set the terms of debate about precise causes and outcomes. Conservatives explained even the workers’ movements of the world as the result of innate differences, of “racial impoverishment,” an intellectual feat that amounted to the biologization of class.14 What appears most distinctive about social scientific identity and practice in the 1920s is the redoubled effort to expose the dangerous “fallacy of equality” that had gained some ground in the previous decade and to extend the ideational scaffolding that supported the concept of international hierarchy.15 Elazar Barkan concluded that “castigating these racist positions as pseudo-science” would be “anachronistic.”16 Yet Alain Locke did make the argument, the first time I have seen it made in fact, in the opening lecture of his remarkable series on international relations in 1915, Race Contacts and Interracial Relations, which he delivered after the Howard University Board of Trustees turned down his proposal to introduce a course on the subject in the regular curriculum.17 Locke tied the rise of racial science to modern imperialism, again, for the first time to my knowledge, an argument that Du Bois made for the first time in print one month later in the Atlantic.18 It was a turn in theory that white analysts in America appeared unable or unwilling to take.19