Chapter 2

Race Children

The white social scientists who offered their expertise to the new imperial state and the handful of critics of the new expansionist wave all assumed that hierarchy was natural, that it was biologically rooted, and that it could be made sense of best by drawing on concepts such as higher and lower races, natural and historic races, savagery and civilization, and the like. Consider in this light the late modification of the conventional Spencerian three-stage evolutionary sequence by America’s most famous anthropologist and explorer, John Wesley Powell (1834–1902), who helped secure the hegemony of the “Anglo-Saxon branch of the Aryan family” across the continent. He designed the reservation system for the Utes and neighboring peoples in Utah and Nevada and built the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology in Washington, D.C. “to study the tribal peoples [the United States] had defeated.” His work had proved, he said, that man passed through four stages: savagery, barbarism, monarchy, and “republikism.”¹

George Stocking argues that if we are to understand the racial ideas of political scientists such as Reinsch, sociologists such as Ross and Giddings, and others involved in discipline building at home and civilization building abroad, it is important to realize that “they were evolutionists almost to a man.” Their ideas about evolution reflected the influence of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), an older strain of “natural development-theory” that imagined a path from savagery to civilization that Darwin himself drew on, and the influence of American anthropologists working in the 1860s and 1870s. Across those decades older ideas about superior and savage “peoples” and “nations” reemerged as notions of organic and innate differences among the “races” of mankind.²

The confluence proved powerfully productive, to judge from the debates, museum exhibits, archeological excavations, and the beginning of Jim Crow the theorizing licensed. Social scientists who began working on problems of world politics or international/interracial relations found grounds for justifying what much later would be called “realism” in arguments about the ceaseless struggle of existence, survival of the fittest, and the aphorism of the era, “might makes right.” Those who challenged this stark reading of world order argued that the expansion of civilization would reduce tendencies toward conflict even as it brought the developed and undeveloped races closer together.

However, the shift from discussing biological traits shared by all humans that were evolved from nonhuman species to theorizing about how society evolved and specifically about evolutionary differences among races was problematic. These were wrong roads down which American social scientists rushed headlong. One was a belief that races were so different and so unequal in capacities that they had to have evolved from different origins (polygenesis), an argument that relied on readings of the Bible. It was also one that Darwin himself tried to refute in his second book, The Descent of Man (1871), even in the face of his own belief in the reality of racial hierarchy. As Carl Degler explains, Darwin rejected the idea of different species of man. The typical markers of race were impossible to explain using his theory of natural selection—that is, “race was outside evolution.”³

Through this pathway came one of the first laws of international relations theory, namely that the differences in races made it impossible for whites to acclimate to tropical environments. Stocking considers versions of the theory that were not occasioned by the war of 1898. He includes Races and People, the lectures that were published in 1890 by the University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Daniel Brinton, who would soon become president of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. The boldest or most extreme version of the claim came from MIT economist William Z. Ripley, who argued that no race ever acclimated to a different environment.⁴ Thus, colonization of the tropics was impossible. Ripley was a leading figure in the American Economic Association who was famous for his work in both racial taxonomy and railroad regulation. The last article Stocking cites is from 1914, written by Yale’s Ellsworth Huntington and published in the Journal of Race Development. Huntington, a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Race Development, argued that the Negro “would apparently die out in the northern United States were he not replenished from the South.”⁵ Nonetheless, the theory and its policy implications continued to preoccupy scholars, research programs, and foundations for another twenty-five years.

A second theoretical question with implications for imperial development policy had emerged, namely whether or not it was possible for the different races to “amalgamate,” that is, to mate and produce healthy offspring or hybrids. The arguments were more complex and the disputes more serious than in the claim about “acclimation.” Ross laid out the basic view in “The Causes of Race Superiority,” where he argued that continued white hegemony depended on “pride of blood.” Many other examples can be found in the works of others who founded the APSA and published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and the American Journal of Sociology.⁶ Complications arise with characterizing support for the claim, between those, for example, who argued that in fact the offspring of such unions tended to be infertile (thus proving that the races were indeed different species) and those who recognized that such offspring might not be sterile but would produce degenerate offspring. The facts of the case might differ, too, depending on the distance between races. There were possibilities for good “cross-races,” and those who rejected polygenesis, for obvious reasons, sought to demonstrate that new and viable mixed races would emerge through intermarriage.⁷ The basic point behind all of this social science theorizing was the idea that race mixing between blacks and whites was wrong, a norm that white social scientists clung to long after the scientific scaffolding for it collapsed.

Most social evolutionist thought rested on a second, even more common assumption about the inheritability of acquired characteristics or behaviors (Lamarckism), the main way the races were imagined to have emerged, multiplied, and traveled their different evolutionary pathways, or, for those who imagined a single evolutionary path for all, the way the Anglo-Saxons gained enormous ground as others increasingly lagged behind. Here was the main engine for the creation of hierarchy. Thus one finds descriptions of, for example, “warlike, peaceful, nomadic, maritime, hunting, [and] commercial races” in the writings of these men.⁸ One also finds the Jewish nose, which, according to one anthropologist, evolved from its origins as “a habitual expression of indignation.”⁹ The new social science disciplines were all infected with the idea of the inheritability of acquired characteristics, and in tracing the course of the virus, Stocking refers to virtually every political scientist and sociologist who wrote on “race formation,” including Burgess, Giddings, Ross, Kelsey, and Reinsch, in a literature that was spawned, as we have seen, by the new round of imperial expansion.

Consider in this light the pioneering contribution of international relations scholar Paul Reinsch to the American Journal of Sociology, “The Negro Race and European Civilization,” where he assays the future of an inferior stock in an era of “increasingly intimate contact” among the “peoples that inhabit the globe.” The “puzzle,” as political scientists say now, was that black people were too vigorous a race to go the way of other races and “fade away.” Survival in the face of slavery proved the race’s relative fitness, Reinsch claimed. Solving the puzzle, that is correctly assessing the race’s prospect for progress, required two things. The first was an expanded case set, to cover “their original state in the forests of central Africa, as a mixed race under…Arab and Hamite” race dominance, “living side by side with a white population” and in those “few isolated communities which enjoy rights of self-government based on European models, as in Hayti and the French Antilles.” It also required frank recognition that outmoded ideas of “the absolute unity of human beings” and of “the practical equality of human individuals” had been abandoned in conformity with the scientific truth of the essential differences among “types of humanity.”¹⁰ Reinsch followed these observations with a long account of his understanding of life in Africa. He contrasted “the marvelous sense for melody” found among blacks in the plantations with the “almost hypnotic effect” of the rhythm of the tom-tom in Africa, the absence of anything like patriotism among those so ready to fight against their neighbors on that continent, and so on.

For Reinsch, these facts confirmed the idea that black brains are physiologically different from white brains even in the face of the accumulating evidence that refuted the idea that the cranial sutures of blacks closed earlier “and [that] organic development of the faculties seem[ed] to cease at puberty.” He also argued, however, that physiological differences did not foreclose the possibility for race improvement because an even greater source of difference with the white race than average individual capacities was the burden of the inheritance of social, political, and climatic conditions on the inferior race. In fact, if these conditions were to change it might even lead to changes in the structure of black craniums over time.¹¹

Reinsch’s main conclusion based on his study of four types of black-inhabited environments (an “original state” of forests in Central Africa, as a mixed-race controlled by Arab and Hamite races in Northern Sudan, living alongside whites in South Africa and North America, and the outlier, that of a self-governing community as in Haiti) is that those outside sub-Saharan Africa had shown some development capacity but only under the tutelage of other races. Reinsch advocated a civilizing policy in Africa that would emphasize economic efficiency, infrastructure development, and the introduction of metallic currency. At the same time, however, native “tribal and social unity” ought to be respected, local institutions kept intact, and property rights preserved. Otherwise, he claimed, Africans would degenerate morally in ways similar to what had happened to blacks in the South after slavery.¹² Reinsch’s argument amounts to an early version of what British colonial reformers would come to call the policy of “indirect rule.” Reinsch was influenced by accounts of the South’s experiments with industrial education and the ascent of Booker T. Washington: “The mass of the negroes cannot pattern primarily upon the whites with whom they come in contact, but should have leaders of their own race to look up to.” Yet those “models of leadership” would not emerge unless whites showed “negroes of high character and intelligence” the way. Reinsch assured his readers that nothing in his analysis implied the possibility of “political power over whites” in Africa or of “social equality” anywhere between the two races.¹³

The most important center for research on the psychology and pedagogy of race development was Clark University, which opened in 1889 under the presidency of psychologist G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924). Hall, who was awarded the first PhD in psychology at Harvard and studied under William James, began his career as a professor of psychology and pedagogics at Johns Hopkins in 1882. Like Johns Hopkins, Clark University was dedicated exclusively to graduate education. Hall founded the Journal of Psychology in 1887, served as president of the new American Psychological Association in 1892, and, while at Clark, started four more journals, including the Pedagogical Seminary (now known as the Journal of Genetic Psychology) in 1891 and the Journal of Race Development in 1910.

Hall’s most famous idea, usually referred to today as the “recapitulation hypothesis,” was that the development of the minds of individuals in their early years repeated stages of the mental history of the human race. A child’s mind thus was both like that of its own race’s earliest ancestors and that of savage adults in the present. Adolescence was a window into evolution, and anthropological studies in the various rain forests and deserts of the world were a window on the world of childhood. Reinsch and others drew on Hall and his many students when they argued that mental development in the lower races stopped at adolescence because the cranial sutures of members of those races fused earlier than they did among white people or insisted that children and savages both acted more out of instinct than intellect. Thus, when Hobson, like many other scholars, journalists, and administrators, used the concept of the child race, the usage reflected the highest stage of social science theorizing rather than inexperience or ignorance. The concept continued to be used for another two decades after Hobson’s Imperialism. In 1930, John H. Harris, looking forward to the creation of a “World ‘Native’ Policy” built on the Versailles Treaty, argued that western states had accepted “the principle of ‘Sacred Trust’ as the basis of relationships between the civilized nations and the backward or child races.”¹⁴ A decade later, the once-scientific concept was being denounced as “a patronizing metaphor.”¹⁵

The problem for Hall and all the other race formation and development theorists is that their basic framework was also being dismantled piece by piece in the 1890s and 1900s. Biologists (but not all biologists by any means) were pounding on the edifice from one side, having taken Mendelian principles as the basis for a new field of genetics that could explain an increasingly vast range of hereditary phenomenon.¹⁶ Coming at race theory from the other side was Columbia’s Franz Boas (1858–1940), the anthropologist who had once worked for Hall at Clark.

Although the summary statement of Boas’s ideas was published in The Mind of Primitive Man in 1911, all the key elements of what made up the Boasian revolution could be read in his scientific articles in the 1890s. Among them was the idea that no civilization was “the product of the genius of a single people” but instead that ideas had been widely disseminated through cultural contact. He wrote of the geniuses of peoples rather than of “a people.” As Stocking explains, “as a critic of racial thought,” Boas sought to define these capacities “in other terms than racial heredity. His answer, ultimately, was the anthropological idea of culture.”¹⁷ Degler, writing two decades after Stocking, stresses Boas’s underlying “critical method,” which was “historical and relativistic.” Historical argument substituted for racial determinism. An example is worth quoting at length.

What drove the Boasian revolution ultimately was the anthropologist’s ideological opposition to racism.

I draw attention to these points because the same commitment, rare at that time in the American academy, to challenging ideologies of racial hierarchy drove Du Bois. The two shared more than just convictions, however.¹⁹ Du Bois’s work in sociology paralleled Boas’s investigations in anthropology, and his famous early article on the “Conservation of the Races,” when read side by side with Stocking’s and Degler’s exegeses of Boas, show Du Bois to be another thinker who was pushing on ahead of his time instead of being trapped by it.²⁰ Du Bois’s historical and empirical investigations of the conditions of blacks in the South, including the 1901 Annals piece, “The Relation of the Negroes to the Whites in the South,” resemble the investigations of Boas. His 1904 essay “The Development of a People,” in which he explained conditions in the Black Belt in terms of history rather than evolution, is even more striking because the word race does not even appear in it. Instead, Du Bois spoke of nations, groups, and classes, and, as the title makes clear, of blacks as a people.²¹ It bears repeating that this was a time when most other social scientists shared a different set of convictions about equality and about the evolutionary basis of inferiority.

Certainly the growing collection of books and articles by the new specialists in imperial administration of the 1900s confirm that the historicist and culturist turn from biological determinism was slow and piecemeal. None of the imperial theorists ever admitted to a conversion experience similar to that of University of Pennsylvania sociologist Carl Kelsey, the onetime critic of Du Bois’s Souls who by 1903 had found it impossible to make a precise determination of the collective capacity of black people for progress because of all the blood mixing that had happened in Africa and in the South.²² By 1907, in pointed commentary on a paper heralding the science of eugenics, Kelsey was challenging its basic precepts. “Heredity…should be used to denote those physical characteristics which come to us through the germ cells of the parents…. We know pretty definitely today that acquired characteristics are not passed on from generation to generation.” Kelsey continued, “This fact…is reacting powerfully upon our social theories.” Ability could be improved among members of any class. “Here lies an argument for universal education that has as yet been scarcely utilized by our educators.” Most important, another “result of our studies is to weaken the belief in superior and inferior races,” which meant that it was necessary to rethink many matters, including barriers to immigration and the value of educating women.²³

The discipline’s new experts on colonial administration and race development tended, instead, to cling to the Lamarckian orthodoxy or move on to new projects and new positions during and after World War I, which makes changes in their ideas hard to gauge. The one possible exception is Paul Reinsch, who delivered his last paper on relations between races during his year at the University of Berlin as the Theodore Roosevelt professor, when he traveled to London to attend the First Universal Races Congress in July 1911. The congress was a remarkable (and until recently forgotten) event in the shaping of modern ideas about racial equality and the right of national self-determination in the years before the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.²⁴ The first objective was explicit, the second articulated on the margins and hardly expected by the Londoners who dreamed of rebuilding the empire on a sounder basis.

Dedicated to challenging ideologies of race supremacy and promoting “interracial harmony,” over 1000 attended. They represented “fifty races and nations,” as Du Bois put it. (In fact, twenty-two states sent representatives.) Mohandas Gandhi; Krishna Gokale, who was one of Gandhi’s political mentors; Tengo Jabavu, the founder of South Africa’s first Bantu newspaper; the heretical Zionist Israel Zangwill; Haiti’s ex-president Francois Legitime; and Filipino nationalist and autonomy advocate Manuel Quezon joined with Mexican, Guatemalan, Japanese, European, and American internationalists; peace movement activists; feminists; and socialists to listen to dozens of papers over four sweltering days inside the University of London’s Imperial Institute.²⁵ A young Alain Locke, who was studying in Berlin, attended the conference, which had an enormous impact on the lectures he would deliver at Howard a few years later. Reinsch wrote one of the papers that was circulated before the conference, although his biography makes no mention of his participation—an irony, given Reinsch’s burgeoning interest in what he called international unions.

The organizers sought to avoid signs of discord among participants and urged members to avoid debate on specific political problems in the various colonies and dependencies. Reinsch protested from the floor one day about exaggerated press reports of disharmony at the congress and the prevalence of anti-patriotic views among participants (“internationalism [has] never been anti-national,” he insisted).²⁶

However, divisions had erupted on some key issues even before the congress was formally convened, during the preliminary meetings of anthropologists and international lawyers. One was the question of the equality of all races and peoples, an organizing principle of the congress that a few participants said could not be true. Another minority view emerged that insisted both on the naturalness of racial antagonism—what we would now call war—as the key means of world progress, again, in the face of the organizers’ abiding interest in ameliorating conflict and securing cooperation among peoples. A third dispute dissented from another of the key organizing principles, that the idea of “race” itself was unscientific and in its place terms such as “nations” or even “civilizations” should be used. One point about the contradictory nature of the arguments advanced at the congress still matters today: “If one speaker says that what we must do above all things is to regard other nations as our equals in every way, and leave them respectfully alone to work out their own national ideas, we applaud him warmly. If the next says the purdah system and infant marriages are degrading institutions, and we must crush them out at any cost, we applaud no less.”²⁷

Reinsch’s paper “Influence of Geographic, Economic, and Political Conditions” for the congress’s session titled Conditions of Progress, appears to position him closer to the potential “unity of humankind” and farther from the “immutability of hierarchy” end of the spectrum. Certainly he was less interested in explaining differences than in demonstrating the significance of what we now call globalization; that is, the growing unity “of the branches of the human family in all parts of the world” through advances in communication, transportation, and the spread of European and American economic power. He explored differences that hindered or advanced race development and nationalism in Europe, Africa, and Asia, according to the degree to which geography had protected people from climate and from one another. The absence of fixed boundaries and the “eternal shifting back and forth of population elements has retarded African development,” he claimed. These rules of geography were coming undone in the twentieth century under the sway of western “scientific mastery.” The question was the degree to which the kind of national self-consciousness that had proved critical in the cases of Europe and Japan could emerge elsewhere in an era of interdependence.²⁸

Reinsch nonetheless saw powerful regularities operating between the tropic and temperate zones of the world economy, and modern development had made exploitation of tropical industries increasingly easy. He was also convinced that the world distribution of natural resources would work to limit the spread of industry unnaturally by “artificial and political factors.” The days of protection were over, he insisted. Neither the west nor the system of civilized states had completed their mission on behalf of humanity, and he repeated a line heard earlier at the conference, that “only the fully national can contribute to the cosmo-national.”²⁹

The brief 1911 paper, which drew from his new book on International Unions, reflected both his rekindled interest in Eastern countries (“the Orient”) and the growing force of nationalism in the colonies and semi-colonies, from Persia to India to China. It is also the last piece of scholarship he produced. In it, Reinsch dispensed with explicit arguments about physiology and deemphasized the concept of the immutability of radical differences that just a few years before had made him skeptical of the idea of the equality of the world’s peoples. The powerful explanatory force he gave to geography and environment is still hard to separate from ideas about the inheritability of acquired characteristics, as we have seen. And he reiterated the law of the tropics of the new science of international relations. What the paper thus seems to underscore is the degree to which anticolonial nationalism was driving professors to revise and perhaps refine their ideas of hierarchy in ways that would be institutionalized just a few years later at Versailles and in the creation of distinct categories of “mandates,” some of which were viewed as moving more or less rapidly toward independence and others of which were destined by their nature to permanent rule by whites.