Chapter 5
Making the World Safe for “Minorities”
In 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois published two of the more controversial works of his long career. In June, Harcourt Brace came out with his masterful Black Reconstruction: A History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. In it, Du Bois used a kind of heterodox (or perhaps ad hoc) Marxist framework in order to radically reorient an understanding of the role of slavery in the making of industrial capitalism (“The dark and vast sea of human labor…[those] on whose bent and broken backs rest today the founding stones of modern industry”) and the historiography of the Civil War (“It was thus the black worker…who brought civil war in America. He was its underlying cause.”).1 The brief notice in the June 13, 1935, issue of The New Yorker described it as “a scholarly chronicle of the Tragic Era by a noted historian who takes the odd view, in distinction to most previous writers, that the Negro is a human being.”
That same month, the New York Times–owned world affairs magazine, Current History, ran Du Bois’s “A Negro Nation within a Nation.” The article is a slightly altered version of a controversial address Du Bois had made the year before at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) on an issue that had led him to step down as editor of its journal, The Crisis, and ultimately resign from the organization.2 Du Bois said the NAACP’s project of integration had failed. He argued that in the face of the Great Depression, the burdens of which had fallen unequally upon the black working class, the only viable solution was recognition of the reality of segregation and its reformation through the building of independent producers’ and consumers’ cooperatives.
One finds a score of valuable, albeit sharply divided, reviews of Black Reconstruction in national dailies and weeklies and in professional social science and history journals. Notably, however, not in the American Political Science Review and the American Historical Review. The Howard school Marxists all linked their critiques of the book directly to what they saw as Du Bois’s disastrous turn toward economic “racialism” and “chauvinism” at a moment when they hoped to turn the NAACP or some successor into an instrument for promotion of a cross-race working-class alliance.3 Yet a central theme in Du Bois’s revisionist history is the success of the southern capitalists’ appeal to white racial solidarity that made such a labor movement impossible in the 1860s and after, an argument that the same Marxist critics passed over in silence.4
For Ralph Bunche, the future first African American president of the American Political Science Association, Du Bois’s “Negro chauvinism” and “racialism” made the “successful crossing with Marxism impossible”—an unfortunate choice of metaphor. Bunche wrote that Du Bois’s was a “pseudo-Marxist interpretation” rather than a social scientifically valid application of Marxism-Leninism, hastily applied, as when he appeared to trace U.S. imperialism back to the South without considering the role of “Northern capital in the Caribbean, in Central and South America, and in the Far East.”5 To Bunche’s credit, his unpublished 1929 essay, “Marxism and the Negro Question,” suggests a certain consistency in his opposition to any strategy of liberation based on an alliance of the black bourgeoisie and working class along the lines of the Third Communist International’s “national minority theory” of 1928 and its (brief) call for black self-determination in the South.6 Bunche also rejected the comparison of African Americans to a colonial people under imperialism, except in the limited sense that the semi-feudal conditions in the South would require “the shattering of the power of Southern landlords through nationalization of the land.” Lenin had gotten it right when he described the “Negro people” as “a subject caste on a racial basis,” a “remnant of feudalism.” Black liberation would come only “as an integral aspect and as inevitable consequence of the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system,” and the task of communism was to “weld together the masses of the Negro people,” tear down “the barriers between the Negro and white workers,” and “break the hold of the capitalist political parties” over black people. Much later he testified, “I have never…endorsed the Communist Party, espoused its cause or supported its ends. Its tactics and its revolutionary philosophy and objectives are, and have always been, repugnant to me.”7 It was probably a good thing that his “Marxism and the Negro Question” remained hidden in his archive.
The dismissal of Du Bois’s “confused” and “unscientific” pseudo-Marxist theorizing in Black Reconstruction by Bunche and his comrades has given way to a dramatically different reading over the past few decades. Cedric Robinson calls it the first real attempt by an American theorist to “sympathetically confront Marxist thought in critical and independent terms” at a time when others (Bunche apparently included) were searching “for ideological orthodoxy” and “cautiously threading an ideological position between Ruthenberg, Lovestone, and Foster in the CPUSA or Trotsky, Bukharin, and Stalin in the Communist International.”8 There has been much less effort until now however to contextualize and historicize Du Bois’s program for social reconstruction (“Nation within a Nation”) in the 1930s or to move beyond the terms of the debate circa 1970 about “black nationalism.”9 Yet black nationalism by itself, whether or not it was motivated by the Comintern, can’t explain a U.S. president’s embrace of Lord Lugard and T. Lothrop Stoddard as valued guides in the 1920s for the future of autonomous black political life, as we saw in chapter 2.10 Nor can it explain Raymond Leslie Buell’s appeal to blacks to “set aside their conventional ideas about assimilation long enough to fight for the principle of Negro autonomy and Negro areas” when he appeared at Howard University’s extended symposium on Problems, Programs, and Philosophies of Minority Groups in April 1935.11
This remarkable event on what then was arguably one of (if not the) most pressing question in international relations is hardly discussed in the histories of the Howard radicals in the 1930s, although Bunche, Frazier, and Locke were all involved in its organization and Du Bois, the bête noir of the scientific Marxists, took part. Rather it seems to have been lost in the shadow cast by a three-day conference at Howard a few weeks later on The Position of the Negro in Our National Economic Crisis. Bunche and others engaged in a debate at his home on the last night of the conference about creating the National Negro Congress as a grassroots, radical alternative to the NAACP. His foundational role in a popular front–era organization with a large presence of Communist Party members would come back to haunt him in the 1950s.12
The less well-known Problems, Programs, and Philosophies of Minority Groups conference took place over two weekends in April 1935. They were bookended by an opening address on “The Plight of Minorities in the Present Day World” by Arnold Wolfers, the newly arrived German émigré to Yale and a closing paper, “Making the World Safe for Minorities,” by the University of Chicago philosopher T. V. Smith. This was Locke’s attempt to establish the global context for the plight of black Americans in the 1930s.13 He had first tested his ideas in a series of three lectures on “The World of Interracial Relations” at Berea College in Kentucky in 1931.14 Locke argued that the identification with (or as) a particular subject race in Africa or elsewhere in the late colonial world might have obscured more than it revealed about conditions in the northern or southern United States, in which case the debate about the League of Nations mandate system and the extent to which it masked continued domination offered no real guide for action.
The relevance of the League of Nations did not begin and end with the mandate system, however, since it had also overseen the building of a “minority rights regime” via treaty in the Eastern European states created at Versailles and a few of the other already existing but putatively less civilized polities in the Balkans.15 The rise of fascism had posed a grave challenge to the idea of securing the collective rights of minorities while pursuing the goal of “assimilation” (and to the idea that what made the states of western Europe “advanced” was that they needed no special protections for their own minorities). One of Hitler’s earliest objectives in fact was the overthrow of the minority rights regime; he was aided by the resurgent racism across the continent and, ultimately, by the armies of the Third Reich.
Versailles thus provided Bunche and his interlocutors with a basic piece of their conceptual apparatus. There are no references to minority “Negro rights” in scholarly journals until the 1920s. Speakers at the conference addressed minority group tactics, compared Jews and African Americans, and discussed the role of religion, the value of cultural autonomy, and so forth. Bunche led the sessions on imperialism and its treatment of “subject peoples” (hardly “minorities”), but an article he published on the eve of the conferences, “A Critical Analysis of the Tactics and Programs of Minority Groups,” explicitly recognized the league’s expansive definition as the one that makes it even possible to speak of racial minorities. The paper he would give at the New Deal conference, The Programs of Organizations Devoted to the Improvement of the Status of the American Negro, extended his critique of the warped perspective that minority-group thinking produces. The moment thus might help us understand Bunche’s future role in building the human rights regime at the United Nations, which was weaker than and starkly different from the minority rights provisions of the League of Nations. Extension of the latter would have opened the United States to challenge on what Bunche called “jim crowism.” The architects in 1945 were explicit about protecting the United States from scrutiny.16
“World Aspects of the Race Problem Including the Imperialistic System”17
The controversy that swirled around Du Bois’s nation-building program led directly to the longest work Bunche published in his lifetime and one that Bunche scholars today value highly.18 Bunche later disowned it. Locke commissioned A World View of Race for an African American adult education pamphlet series he was producing known as the Bronze Booklets. As the inside cover reported, the series, funded by the Carnegie Corporation, aimed at presenting “the Negro’s own view of his history.” However, Bunche’s neo-Marxian analysis of racism as the primary ideological means for legitimizing a hierarchical world order looked nothing like the first three pamphlets in the series on African American adult education, music, and art.
A World View of Race consists of four densely packed but clearly laid out and jargon-free chapters that in essence explain Bunche’s appeal to anti-capitalist working-class solidarity as the only means to real freedom for African Americans.
First he showed how all the essential and frequently contradictory claims that made up racial “science,” for example, claims about the reality of superior and inferior kinds and the dangers of miscegenation, had been falsified. The puzzle that emerged was the nonetheless increasing visibility of national policies in the name of race.19 The answer that Bunche offered was that racialism as a “myth” worked as a “perfect stalking-horse for selfish group politics and camouflage for brutal economic exploitation.” It naturalized and justified hierarchy in the era of “the rights of man” and the “rights of people.” He discussed racism in Germany, and while he recognized the seriousness of racial conflict in the Pacific, India, and the West Indies, all cases where challenges to entrenched systems of subjugation were likely to intensify, he did not attempt anything like a systematic analysis. Instead, he focused primarily on race and imperialism in Africa (as “imperialism’s greatest and most characteristic expression”) and disputed the significance of the difference between British and French policies, the subject of his 1934 award-winning dissertation. He then turned to the United States and racism’s contribution to the domination of the capitalist class.20
His biographer, Charles Henry, is right that Bunche’s concept of “social race,” and his analysis of the conceptual incoherence of all attempts at racial classification and the pernicious effects such attempts produce and sustain, “prefigure” debates that would take place fifty years later (and counting) about race as a social construct.21 Like some (but not all) who have made the argument since, Bunche thought that racial identification, even as a defensive strategy, made it that much more difficult to confront the problem of class in the United States.22 Around this time, Buell reported, “I had an interesting talk with Ralph Bunche the other day, who says he is completely an anti-racialist and apparently does not even favor talking about it. His idea is that we should work for an improved social system which will benefit white and black alike.”23 In the book, however, he held out for more: “class will some day supplant race in world affairs. Race war then will be merely a side-show to the gigantic class war which will be waged in the big tent we call the world.”24
In A World View of Race, Bunche took apart a key piece of theorizing by the discipline’s founding racial realists. Predictions of world race war “assume that both the white and black peoples of the earth have a common fundamental interest in the color of their skin.” Predictions of the rising black or yellow (or later allied black and yellow) races “ignore…the class, tribal, religious, cultural, linguistic, nationalistic and other differences among both black and white peoples.”25 It wouldn’t be the first time that rational but untrue beliefs proved resistant to debunking by academics, since the “threat” of race war continued to haunt White House advisors and colonial administrators-turned-international race relations experts for decades.
The more important conceptual innovation Bunche made in A World View of Race is the insight into the ordering principal that structured the new modern capitalist-imperialist international order. Hierarchy was what mattered most, not “anarchy” or “power politics.”
The vital issues involved in the practices of our contemporary political and economic life more and more imply the inequality of peoples…. The ruling classes among the dominant peoples of the Western World find it expedient, therefore[,] to hark back beyond Locke, Rousseau and Jefferson to the more limited and comforting philosophy of “equality” advanced by the Greek philosopher Aristotle:—“some men are born to serve and some to rule.”
In a world such as ours some such creed of inequality is both inevitable and indispensable. For it furnishes a rational justification for our coveted doctrines of blind nationalism, imperialism and the cruel exploitation of millions of our fellow-men. How else can our treatment of the so-called “inferior races” and “backward peoples” be explained and rationalized?26
Ironically, in light of his future career as a UN official who oversaw the process of decolonization, Bunche showed little capacity at this juncture to think creatively about any kind of meaningful strategy for those subjected to economic exploitation, political disfranchisement, and moral debasement in the African dominions, colonies, mandates, and protectorates. The deeper irony is that despite Bunche’s analysis of the exceptional conditions of black America, when it came to outlining a strategy for African liberation Bunche’s solution remained identical: the violent overthrow of capitalism (“class war”) in the West.
Consider in this light his review of George Padmore’s brutal dissection of empire, How Britain Rules Africa, published the same year. Bunche’s criticism follows directly from A World View of Race: Padmore’s “nationalism” (“the right of self-determination and Africa for the Africans are cardinal points in his thinking”) had led him, like Du Bois and other U.S. race leaders, to the false solution of “Pan-Africanism” when the “surest road toward liberation of the African masses” was the overthrow of capitalism in the metropole.27 It is also true, however, that Bunche had little or no familiarity with the actors and political movements in West Africa, Kenya Colony, and South Africa, and, as he himself admitted, little ability to see colonialism from the standpoint of its victims. In part, it is what drove him to embark on a two-year retraining project in anthropological methods (funded by the Social Science Research Council) with Northwestern’s Melville Herskovits, the London School of Economics’ Bronislaw Malinowski, and Cape Town’s Isaac Shapira). The project included field work in East Africa, and no less important, extended engagements with leading pan-Africanists in London and Paris.28
Lymon Bryson, the New York educator who oversaw Locke’s series for the Carnegie Corporation approved Bunche’s Leninist-flavored approach to race and imperialism, although he said the Marxism was “wrongheaded.” Locke, however, chose not to fight when he received word that that Carnegie would not approve the next booklet in the series, Du Bois’s long essay on “The Negro and Social Reconstruction,” although Locke had “banked on the demi-Marxian slant of the Bunche point of view to balance the racialist view of Du Bois in a very interesting way.” In some way that none of the accounts to date have adequately explained, Du Bois’s dissection of the failures of the post-emancipation era and his appeal for black unity for economic and political self-defense troubled the foundation’s agent more than Bunche’s call for class war.29
Black Atlantic Crossings
The history of internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s has conventionally entailed mapping a set of intellectual connections that move in parallel with flows of capital and the maneuvering of diplomats across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The transatlantic or Anglo-American or, as they said then, Anglo-Saxon alliance—for example, the story of the parallel founding of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York—has so dominated the imaginations of later generations that it was necessary to spend some time tracing the trans-Pacific institution-building efforts (and leading institution builders) of the early postwar period back to the earliest self-defined specialists in international relations. Doing so of course has made it easier to see how empire featured so prominently in the theorizing of academics in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s and the racial order to which most critics of imperialism such as Buell remained committed.
Hubert Harrison, a radical journalist and independent intellectual who was born in St. Croix, pinpointed the blind spot in “white capitalist internationalism” when it came to oppressed peoples and in particular those of African descent, and he spent the last years of his life seeking to build an alliance of people of African descent or a “Black International” and, more ambitiously still, a “Colored International” of the world’s oppressed peoples.30 The Pan-African Congresses of 1919 and 1921, which were designed to influence the great powers but were instead opposed by them, was one node of an emerging black internationalist (and increasingly anti-imperialist) counternetwork. Rayford Logan, who joined Howard in 1938, first met Du Bois; established a lasting friendship with Dantes Bellegarde, the Haitian minister to France and its representative to the League of Nations; and forged his deepest political and intellectual commitments at these conferences. E. Franklin Frazier attended the Paris session of the 1921 congress at a time when he was hoping to win a fellowship to study race relations in France and Morocco.31
George Padmore, a former Howard student and a Communist Part operative in the period 1927–1933, and his childhood friend, the Trotskyist and outspoken advocate of Caribbean independence, C. L. R. James, were at the center of a second node of individuals and organizations in the mid-1930s. The network included the International African Friends of Ethiopia and the International African Service Bureau, both based in London, but the network stretched across to Paris, the Caribbean, and West Africa.32 Out of this moment and milieu came The Black Jacobins, James’s great work about Toussaint L’Ouverture.
Brent Edwards makes the general point about interwar black internationalism that it was “at once inside communism, fiercely engaged with its ideological debates and funneled through its institutions, and at the same time aimed at a race-specific formation” against “the Comintern’s universalism, adamantly insisting that racial oppression involves factors and forces that cannot be summed up or submerged in a critique of class exploitation.”33 We have seen a perfect example of this dynamic in Ralph Bunche’s dismissal of Du Bois as a racialist (and pseudo-Marxist) who was an obstacle to working-class unity and so objectively served the interests of capital. Like Bunche, Padmore and his comrades attacked Du Bois, other prominent members of the NAACP, and non-Communist black labor leaders on the same grounds, and like Bunche Padmore argued that the path to freedom lay in “the struggle against race chauvinism” and the unity of workers “of all races and nations.” Padmore changed his mind after he quit the party in 1933. Word had come down to stop agitating in support of the liberation movements in Africa and Asia. The new Soviet diplomatic offensive sought alliance with the imperialist powers against fascism. Padmore had apparently become one more agent of capitalism and “Betrayer of the Negro Liberation Struggle.”34 The winding path forward as a leading anti-imperialist theorist, pan-Africanist, and brilliant tactician of African liberation would eventually take him to Ghana as an advisor to his protégé, Kwame Nkrumah.
Bunche spent time with Padmore and others in his radical circles in the years before the war, which included Kenyatta, who tutored Bunche in Swahili; Max Yergan, a YMCA missionary who had administered Carnegie Corporation projects in South Africa before his radicalization and move to the United States, where he became head of the National Negro Congress; Paul Robeson, the actor who was arguably the most visible and outspoken advocate of racial equality of his day; Eslanda Robeson, an anthropologist and journalist; and the young Oxford graduate student Eric Williams, who would take over Bunche’s classes at Howard during the war years.
The Council on African Affairs
Max Yergan appeared in 1936 at the first National Negro Congress in Chicago. He later moved to Harlem as a National Negro Congress representative, and he was the first African American lecturer to give a course in Negro history at City College of New York. After his arrival, the deteriorating security conditions for black people in the mid-1930s, from Bengazi to Cape Town to the Dominican borderlands, gained increasing prominence on the black internationalist and left-liberal agendas.35 For instance, Yergan wrote a pamphlet on the toll that producing raw materials took on South African workers (Gold and Poverty in South Africa) for Mary van Kleeck of the Russell Sage Foundation.36 He participated with Bunche and Melville Herskovits, head of the new anthropology department at Northwestern University and the leading figure in “African studies” as it would come to be known in the 1950s, on the Africa panel at the 1938 New York meeting of the Association for the Study of Negro Life. His most important initiative was to found together with Paul Robeson the International Committee on African Affairs in 1937, renamed the Council on African Affairs in 1941, after the war made it impossible to coordinate with comrades in London, Paris, and Cape Town.
The International Committee on African Affairs/Council on African Affairs was what we would now call an activist nongovernmental organization, in this case the first to deal critically with (colonialism in) Africa. It hoped to shape U.S. policy. It was also the only integrated international relations organization of any kind. It mounted a number of large successful conferences, rallies, and speaking tours in its early years. Yergan’s ambitions included a research arm and a program for training African students in the United States, but the organization ran on a shoestring budget (Robeson paid the startup costs). Other founding members were Buell, Bunche, Franz Boas, and René Maran, the novelist and great friend of Locke, but it depended on the work and skills of insiders such as Van Kleeck and others associated with the larger, more established Institute of Pacific Relations.
Unlike the latter, however, Yergan had no success with raising funds from the Carnegie Corporation for an organization that was pressing for African liberation. Carnegie had supported programs, as the institution itself later admitted, that made “construction of the apartheid government” possible. Yergan had dim prospects generally of winning over elites with the argument that the oppressed in Africa constituted a vital U.S. interest.37 As Franz Boas, by then an emeritus professor at Columbia, told him in 1939, “It will not be easy to convince Europeans or Americans that people on lower stages of civilization are not there solely for purposes of exploitation.”38 The views of foundations and state agencies might have shifted marginally after the United States entered the war and prepared to land troops in North Africa, but by that time most of the International Committee on African Affairs/Council on African Affairs principals were under surveillance and a few, like Bunche, had resigned.39
Living Hand to Mouth
Alain Locke was the scholar closest to George Padmore, who had studied with him. Their correspondence tells the story of his and his pacifist comrades’ efforts to flee Britain as war threatened in 1938, at least until the signing of the Munich Pact. Up until then, their work had stressed fascism’s relationship to other forms of imperialist ideology and practice and pressed the position that the surest path to peace in a world rent by imperialism was for workers to support the liberation of the colonies. In addition, they argued that colonial peoples should seize the opportunity provided by the war to advance one cause only—independence.40 C. L. R. James was able to reach the United States, but Padmore had been blacklisted. Locke sent him money for a visa and travel costs to Haiti in October 1938, and James sent a copy of the manuscript he had been working on, The Black Man’s Burden in Africa, to Locke for safekeeping. British publishers wouldn’t touch the book after the war began.41 Padmore ultimately stayed put. He had to close down his journal and struggle to find local outlets for his anti-war views. He wrote regularly for the black press in the United States (the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, The Crisis) throughout the war, but he occasionally had difficulties with U.S. censors in Washington and London.
Eric Williams, who was Padmore and James’s protégé, although a much more politically circumspect intellectual, was able to leave for the United States in the summer of 1939 thanks to the efforts of Bunche, economist Abrams Harris, and above all Locke, when he joined the Howard political science faculty. There he began to establish his reputation as one of the two leading scholars of the Caribbean and the modern world economy.42 In his first year at Howard, the Julius Rosenwald Fund paid for a summer of research in Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, which he drew on when he produced a long-delayed Bronze Booklet for Locke, The Negro and the Caribbean (1942) and when he revised his Oxford DPhil as Capitalism and Slavery (1944). He called the former “an out and out attack on colonialism in the Caribbean.” He had to resign from the research staff of the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission after Padmore republished the work in London in 1944.43 Capitalism and Slavery ranks with Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction and James’s Black Jacobins, and is probably the most well-known among specialists working outside the orbit of Africana studies.44
Williams also had to bear much of the teaching burden of a small political science department at Howard that was facing an influx of military trainees at a time when Bunche was on leave from teaching much of the time. Bunche returned to campus in the fall of 1938 with a grant to write a book based on his Africa sojourn, which he never produced. Instead, Raymond Buell tried to arrange a government appointment for Bunche through Cordell Hull, Roosevelt’s secretary of state, but Bunche had no luck on this front until 1944.45 Instead he went on leave from teaching again in 1939 to work with Gunner Myrdal on An American Dilemma (1944) while continuing to administer the department, organizing a major conference on Negro studies in 1939 for the American Council on Learned Societies, and seeking, without success, to capture some of the wartime rents for a large research program at Howard.
Bunche produced over 3,000 pages in four long memoranda for Myrdal, but despite encouragement (and unlike other project principals), he never published any of this work. Thus although Northwestern’s Melville Herskovits had used Bunche to organize a conference of the American Council on Learned Societies at Howard (any other venue in Washington, D.C., would have run up against the problem of meals and accommodations for the invited African Americans), behind the scenes he had a ready-made excuse for leaving Bunche off the committee-in-formation that would set the agenda for research on blacks during and after the war. He told ACLS Secretary-Treasurer Mortimer Graves that “Bunche has not produced for many years as we have hoped he would, and I do not think he ought to be included.”46
Locke would have to be excluded on different grounds. In 1939, Locke began what turned out to be his last book-length anthology, When Peoples Meet: A Study in Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World, which he put together with Marxist sociologist Bernhard J. Stern. The book presents excerpts from the work of over seventy writers (including Leonard Woolf), biologists, economists, psychologists (including Otto Klineberg), historians (including Jacques Barzun, Hans Kohn, and Arnold Toynbee) anthropologists (including Boas and his students Ruth Benedict, Herskovits, Margaret Mead) sociologists (including W. O. Brown, who was then at Howard but would go on to found the African Studies Center at Boston University; E. Franklin Frazier; and Donald Young, then a key figure at the Social Science Research Council) and political scientists (including G. F. Hudson and Oscar Jaszi).
Locke framed the problem of the book and wrote the introduction to each section. As his biographers stress, these constitute a major restatement of issues that he first wrestled with in his 1915 lectures on international relations. By 1939, he saw racialism as only one mechanism or rationalization in “the struggle for group power and dominance.” It was no less a fiction than the idea of “separate, distinctive and ethnically characteristic cultures.” He developed taxonomies of cultural conflict—distinguishing, for instance, the operation of power politics in creating minority issues in Europe from imperialism—and analyzed specific techniques or devices of dominance such as racialism and “the tactics of survival and counter-assertion” by “submerged people.”47 The book ends with a survey of contemporary conflict across Europe, the European empires, and the Americas. E. Franklin Frazier was correct in his review to link the analysis in Locke and Stern’s When Peoples Meet to Lord Bryce’s foundational 1902 lecture in international relations, “The Relations of the Advanced and Backward Races of Mankind.” It foretold of the crisis, he said, that was attributable to “the rise of a racial philosophy…backed by military power” that now engulfed the world.48
Two additional points stand out in Frazier’s review, however. He traced the way the “relations between races and its import in world history” had finally emerged as an issue of concern for the wider educated public. “In the United States, the problem of the relations of races has been viewed as a local problem. As the American empire expands into the Caribbean and South America, and finds itself in conflict with Asiatic nationalism and imperialism, the problem of race and culture contact assumes a new meaning.”49 Yet as we have seen, this “new meaning” was the central issue for international relations scholars at Clark and elsewhere in the years before Frazier studied for his MA there. He made the same mistake as Bunche in including Asia and Africa as places where “minorities” confronted “dominant races.” The specificity of the American case was apparently still hard to keep straight.