Introduction

A Mongrel American Social Science

In the first decades of the twentieth century in the United States, international relations meant race relations. This sentence is bound to strike many readers as both strange and wrong, just as it once did me. The problem of empire or imperialism, sometimes referred to as “race subjection,” was what preoccupied the first self-identified professors of international relations. They wrestled with the prospect that a race war might lead to the end of the world hegemony of whites, a future that appeared to many to be in the offing. The scholars had also identified the epicenter of the global biological threat in the three square miles or so at the northern end of Manhattan borough known as Harlem.

Each of these claims at first presentation seems false because 100 years later, a new common sense has taken hold. Today, professors teach that international relations is the scientific study of the interaction among “states” (or “countries” to the uninitiated), with other, lesser “actors” trailing behind. They also speak more abstractly about study of the “state system.”¹ Students interested in race relations look elsewhere in course catalogs and to other experts and departments.² So too do those wanting to learn about empires, because imperialism is a thing of the past for social scientists. And no one thinks of Harlem as the capital of a country, so it has no standing in any contemporary understanding of international relations.³

In African American studies, meanwhile, together with those parts of the humanities and human sciences most impacted by the field’s emergence in the 1960s–1970s, scholars study the Harlem Renaissance, which is a shorthand for the remarkable movement of intellectual and cultural self-determination that in the 1920s had white scholars scrambling to head off the end days. Many of the thinkers most closely associated with the movement taught at Howard University in Washington, D.C. The 250-acre campus in the northwest sector of the nation’s capital with its Harvard- and Chicago-trained star faculty remains terra incognita in all standard accounts of the discipline of international relations in the United States. This last fact may prove the most discomfiting one in the years ahead.

When we follow the archival record to places beyond Hyde Park, Harvard Square, and Morningside Heights, the central repositories of America’s “national” international relations history, to Sugar Hill in Harlem (a mile or so from Columbia University but a world away, judging from our maps of intellectual fields); the District of Columbia’s Shaw neighborhood; Port of Spain, Trinidad; Camden, United Kingdom; and Accra, Ghana, it is as if we’ve left behind one field of study and intellectual disputation and wandered into another that is both wholly separate and intimately related. For convenience, call that field the history of “black internationalism.” A central debate in that field concerns the Cold War’s impact on the U.S. “long” civil rights movement, with its roots in the Harlem Renaissance, and on the academic enterprise we know as African American studies.⁴

What White World Order, Black Power Politics shows is that the intellectual entanglements in Morningside Heights and Sugar Hill are part of a common and complicated history. The project of liberation was from its inception (and by necessity) a world-spanning political and theoretical movement in response to the theory and practice of white supremacy. What is new and important in this book is the discovery that the intellectuals, institutions, and arguments that constituted international relations were shaped by and often directly concerned with advancing strategies to preserve and extend that hegemony against those struggling to end their subjection. The new science emerged as a key supplier of intellectual rationales for the political class long before the Cold War—in fact, for the entirety of the long American imperial century.⁵ This discovery upends our commonplace understandings of international relations and U.S. foreign policy.

In this book I trace developments in the history of academic institutions and the politics of academic life not as if they constitute a cloistered world (the “ivory tower”), but as an important part of the history of the United States in the world. It is effectively a sequel to my last book, America’s Kingdom, about the unbroken past of hierarchy on the world’s mining frontiers.⁶ There I used company and State Department records to show that the story that the private-owned giant Arabian American Oil Company told about its alleged commitment to developing Saudi Arabia’s human capital—one that scholars continued to reproduce unreflectively decades later—was a myth. Similarly, the private papers of professors, journals, research centers, and foundations reveal a story fundamentally at odds with established belief, even if some still consider the oil sector to be orders of magnitude more important to the twentieth century than the knowledge industry. Yes, academics who first defined their subject matter as international relations in the period 1900–1910 were never satisfactorily practical enough to suit the statesmen (and they were all men back then). Policymakers thought the same about most of a later, somewhat better-known, cast of action intellectuals who had occasional walk-on roles in our histories of the Cold War—the George Kennans, Hans Morgenthaus, Walt Rostows, William Kaufmanns, Bernard Brodies, and so on. This tendency on the part of statesmen and politicians to dismiss the value of scholars and their theories continued in the post-1945 era even as the expanding national security state drew increasing numbers of new and rebranded experts on peace and war, defense strategy, and foreign policy into its orbit. Meanwhile, the critics of U.S. Cold War policy considered the various strategic studies institutes, centers, schools, and so forth at the head of the newly commissioned, government-subsidized academic armada to be nothing less than a full-fledged service arm of the empire.⁷ The influence of a discipline and its reigning ideas entails more than the extent to which some professor has the ear of the prince or research findings contribute to policy.

Colleges and universities are crucial, obviously, to the continuous reproduction of our everyday ways of thinking, speaking, and writing about world politics, ways that are recognizable not only to the miniscule readership of scholarly journals such as International Security and International Organization but also to those who read (or write for) the New York Times and Foreign Affairs or who watch (or appear on) PBS News Hour and the Daily Show: imagine all those graduates of the Baby Boom– and Cold War–driven years of expansion in American higher education who studied or majored in the subject en route to careers as attorneys, journalists, researchers, writers, teachers, consultants, chief executive officers, department of defense analysts, legislators, staffers, generals, presidential advisors, secretaries of state, and, not least, professors. Henry Kissinger (PhD Harvard 1954), Madeline Albright (PhD Columbia, 1976), and Condoleezza Rice (PhD University of Denver 1981), among many other notables, all studied and taught international relations prior to their years in the White House and leadership positions in the State Department.⁸ Fareed Zakaria, the 28-year-old who oversaw a major facelift of the magazine Foreign Affairs prior to his star turn at Newsweek, Time, and CNN, is another PhD (Harvard 1993) in the “realist tradition” as he put it, of “international relations history and theory.”⁹ The alumni list is almost impossibly long, and their influence, although hard to measure, is real.

Think back to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 (or for that matter to NATO’s intervention in Bosnia in 1993) for evidence of the ways undergraduate lecture and graduate comprehensive exam categories inform debates in the public sphere. Antagonists then routinely identified (or derided their opponents) as Kissengerian “realists” or Wilsonian “idealists.” Others claimed that positions on questions of war and peace in the post-9/11 era no longer corresponded to these old ideological constructs (or, as students learn to refer to them, theories, theoretical traditions, or paradigms).¹⁰ Recall, too, the wide play given in the mid-2000s and after to the idea of “soft power.” Harvard’s Joseph Nye (PhD Harvard 1964), a onetime student of Pan Africanism now judged among the top four or five or six most influential thinkers in the discipline, had coined the term a decade earlier in Bound to Lead (1990), and he hit it big after rolling it out a second time in Soft Power (2004).¹¹ Similarly, Clash of Civilizations (1996), a book by his late colleague Samuel Huntington (Ph.D. Harvard 1950), Zakaria’s dissertation supervisor, sold in greater numbers and presumably earned the author a far greater advance than is typical for a book traded on the academic market.¹² People inside and outside the Washington, D.C., beltway certainly acted as if these books matter.

This is not to begrudge them, by the way. They represent a long tradition of what Bruce Kuklick calls the discipline’s “intellectual middlemen” who are skilled at getting ideas across to nonacademic audiences in Washington, New York, and points beyond.¹³ Intellectuals played this role long before the Cold War, and it is hardly surprising to find them rediscovering and recycling ideas from earlier years. For example, Clash of Civilizations resembles the earlier, arguably more influential, and no less sensational The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat against White World Supremacy (1920) by one of Huntington’s forebears, T. Lothrop Stoddard (PhD Harvard 1916). Stoddard wrote his dissertation under Archibald Cary Coolidge (PhD Freiburg 1892), the founding editor of Foreign Affairs. Stoddard also provided one of the first analyses I know of America’s soft power, but his many works on international affairs are all but unknown now. Huntington and Nye (among others) reprise the intellectual middleman’s role and also reanimate the arguments of an earlier, not very well known era when biological racism and resource imperialism shaped the discipline and, not coincidentally, the policies of successive U.S. administrations. That history is critical to recovering the ideas of what I call the Howard school of international relations theory, whose leading thinkers alone evinced a commitment to understanding and writing about white world supremacy from the standpoint of its victims.

International Relations 101

The problem, we now know in large part thanks to historians and sociologists of science, is that scholars reliably produce unreliable accounts of the past of their own fields.¹⁴ International relations is no exception.¹⁵ American schoolchildren learn the story of the midnight ride of Paul Revere together with any number of other myths about “the nation’s origins, achievements, and destiny.”¹⁶ Such myths function to produce a common consciousness and obscure the existence of hierarchy. The practitioner histories of international relations in the United States do roughly the same thing to the same end through the socialization of graduate students in the rituals of PhD programs and through lecture courses that pass on the discipline’s invented traditions and escape from knowledge to generations of undergraduates who will become public intellectuals, politicians, and policymakers.

Every year thousands of undergraduates across the United States sign up for a class titled “Introduction to International Relations.” In the first week or two they learn that three broad rival theoretical traditions vie for explanatory primacy among specialists. The first (and it is always first) among unequals is “realism.” The second is “liberalism” or “liberal internationalism.” The third is “constructivism” (thirty years ago it was “neo-Marxism”), a kind of residual category that consists of various persuasions of critics on the discipline’s margins, the serious consideration of which is honored more in the breach than in the observance.

For self-identified “realists,” the struggle for power among states is a law operating across space and time, one that statesmen in antiquity or their later chroniclers discovered and that their descendants discount at their (and our) peril. Instructors might drive the lesson home for undergraduates by assigning a fragment of the History of the Peloponnesian War by Athenian general and historian Thucydides (ca. 460–395 BCE) that is known as the Melian dialogue to demonstrate the timelessness of realism’s truth about power politics: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”¹⁷

Who teaches these introductory classes? The professors at the podiums in the large lecture halls are more often than not freshly minted PhDs and new assistant professors, while those who run the small discussion sections—if the undergraduates are lucky enough to have them—are first- and second-year graduate students. An even more reliable generalization is that all those young professors and graduate students in the intro courses will be white. The key point, however, is that these professors and would-be professors have committed vast amounts of their time and energy in an intensive period of immersion in the discipline and its literature. It is any academic profession’s primary method for passing on its origin story in the guise of a canon of theories and theorists.

That is, the chains of transmission of the classical beliefs from Thucydides and their transubstantiation into theories by his putative intellectual heirs come to comprise the organizing framework and content of all those intro courses, the undergraduate version a stripped-down version of what is taught to the graduate students. The new professors will design their first stand-alone classes based on the ones for which they served as teaching assistants, which are based on the ones their own professors served as teaching assistants for slightly longer ago at one of the twenty to thirty research universities that reproduce the professoriate (and, increasingly, produce faculty outside the tenure system) across the country. Little wonder, then, that the syllabi all tend to look the same.¹⁸ Identification of and with a tradition helps to make the discipline something more than a collection of professors and graduate students, blogs, journals, annual conventions, PhD qualifying exam reading lists, and anxieties of the moment. Just as inevitably, however, disciplining of this kind shifts one’s critical gaze away from the complicated history of the development and transmission of what more often than not are fables of origin.¹⁹

Consider a heretofore-unrecognized puzzle that emerges from the archive of model syllabi, textbooks, and surveys of teaching and research in international relations that was beginning to be compiled and published in the mid-1920s, which reflected the accumulation of knowledge under the then-new rubric for the previous ten to fifteen years.²⁰ None of those long-forgotten authors and advocates for recognition of a new interdisciplinary specialization described anything remotely like a continuous tradition traceable to the ancients. To do so would hardly have aided the legitimacy of a claim of autonomy for their new enterprise and its specialized object of knowledge. The pattern is in fact common to academic specializations of all kinds that emerged later in the twentieth century, from art history and literary criticism to cultural anthropology and area studies.²¹

In the case of international relations, conditions changed after World War II. Although international relations professors continued to express anxieties in the 1950s and 1960s about the identity of field as a “real” discipline—presidents of the 50-year-old American Political Science Association (APSA) were still having trouble specifying precisely how their work differed from that of sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, economists, and even historians—international relations was no longer in need of defense within the postwar university. The Cold War was all the justification the discipline required. It is during this new moment of relative disciplinary security that a new cohort, in the course of seeking to establish its own hegemony, began a process by which they elided “the historical boundary between the era of the research university and the pre-professional era.”²² The professors have not looked back since—at least not without blinders on.

Today, unaware of the history of its early decades, a new generation of specialists in international relations in the United States since the 1950s practice their craft under the sway of two entwined myths of empire. The first is the idea that the United States is not and never was (much of) an imperial power. The second is that the discipline itself has never showed much interest in the study of imperialism. The first idea is, to my thinking, an example of willful ignorance in the face of much devastating argument (and violence) to the contrary across the globe in the last half century. It is basically the academics’ version of the flag pin that all politicians now routinely attach to their lapels.²³ We might agree to disagree on this point, although it would take some work to explain the seeming delusion under which an earlier generation labored. There is no disputing the mythical status of the second idea. The authoritative version can be found in the opening pages of Columbia University political scientist Michael Doyle’s Empires (1986), where he baldly states that “mainstream” international relations showed no scholarly interest in imperialism, a point no reviewer of the book ever challenged him on.²⁴ Like all myths, its value is not in the facts that it purports to offer but in what it tells us about experts on world affairs such as Doyle who believe it to be a valid argument about the world.

Doyle’s disciplinary ancestors knew the opposite to be true about the United States and about imperialism. By “ancestors” I don’t mean the fictive ones conjured in today’s textbooks and undergraduate lectures. By ancestors I mean (and I use this identifier intentionally) the men at Princeton, Columbia, and elsewhere who founded the first international relations departments, funding committees, memorials, journals, summer institutes, research centers, conferences, and professional associations. I include those who gained the early support of the Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation. The term “ancestor” includes the textbooks and model syllabi that identified and tried to draw boundaries around the new field for the first time in the years before and after World War I and those who went on the radio and wrote in the mass circulation magazines and newspapers to disseminate its scientific findings.²⁵ By “ancestor” I mean the whole system of intellectual, professional, and institutional production that has made international relations what it is today, including how international relations is taught in those introductory courses that pass the rudiments of the discipline on to the next generation of scholars, opinion makers, and policy professionals.

Application of a Model of Mixed Institutional Origins

Three well-known phenomena of the last decades of the nineteenth century converged to influence the turn by U.S. universities toward studying the problems that professors and what we now call public intellectuals called supremacy and dependence. A new round of imperial competition and expansion into Africa, Asia, and Latin America was in full swing. The new imperialism coincided with the creation of the flagship institutions of the modern social sciences in America, including departments, schools, endowed professorships, and professional associations.²⁶ Within many of those departments, evolutionary theory, social Darwinism, and racial anthropology shaped the research orientations of leading scholars and schools.²⁷

Various sociologists, political scientists, historians, psychologists, and geographers at Wisconsin, Yale, Chicago, Clark, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia begin to carve out space for the interdisciplinary study of international relations. They did so even before some of the flagship departments and professional associations of the disciplines were founded.²⁸ It was insufficient even then, however, to stake a claim for autonomy and resources for the new specialization simply on the ground that the problems produced by increasing contact and conflict across the world’s biological borders spilled over the disciplinary ones. Rather, the pioneering specialists offered a unique approach to the better management of colonial administration and race subjection. The theory of “race development” held out the prospect of a more peaceful and prosperous white hegemony while reducing the threat of the race war that preoccupied self-identified white elites in the United States and elsewhere in the 1890s and 1920s and again in the 1950s.

In light of these facts, I propose we do for the history of international relations what others have done for the broader social, cultural, and political history of the United States (of which the academic discipline is a part). In short, its racism needs to be brought to light and given serious attention. As a case in point and a kind of model of inquiry, we can look to Ann Douglas’s 1995 award-winning cultural history of jazz-age New York, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. Its key argument is that we can’t understand the history of American modernism without understanding the history of Harlem, its “Renaissance,” and the African American movement of liberation. Modernism was, she insisted, a thoroughly entangled or, as an international relations professor might say, “complex-interdependent” movement of black and white writers, novelists, poets, musicians, playwrights, and philosophers.

What is true about modernism and Manhattan is also true about international relations in the United States in a fundamental respect. That is, we can’t understand the history of the early decades of the discipline without understanding the long and globe-spanning freedom movements that are central to its intellectual, social, and institutional development. Consider another example to be explored in more detail later, in this case one linking the Harlem Renaissance directly to an important institution of the discipline-in-formation. The publishers of Howard University theorist Alain Locke’s famous “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” (1925) headed New York’s Foreign Policy Association, a more influential group in those years than the city’s other private membership organization, the Council on Foreign Relations, which at the time functioned more like a club, and a sleepy one at that. To Foreign Policy Association leaders, the Harlem Renaissance was an instance of race development similar to other movements and places where “race contacts” had intensified notably in settler societies around the globe.

Harlem thus primarily served as a model in the negative sense for the future of world order as theorized by white scholars in the new modern scientific discipline. The Harlem-as-crucible-of-modernism in Douglas’s account represented intersecting vectors of artists and thinkers remaking mass culture via engagement with black poets, painters, and playwrights. The opposite was true in the case of international relations theory, where self-identified white professors sought to understand, explain, and improve the world’s stock of inferior beings and thus allegedly avert political and biological catastrophe. There, the vision of “interdependence” quickly gave way to the laws, as they described it, of “supremacy and dependency.” For the psychologists, geographers, historians, and political scientists pioneering the scientific study of international relations, in other words, Harlem, particularly as the northern migration of African Americans took off in the early 1910s, exemplified the threat to white supremacy posed by “backward” and dependent peoples across the globe.

Harlem represented something distinctly different to the first African American theorists of international relations. As Locke himself wrote, it was the “largest Negro community in the world,” the “advance guard of the African peoples in their contact with Twentieth Century civilization,” the “home of the Negro’s “Zionism,” and, as “in India, in China, in Egypt, Ireland, Russia, Bohemia, [Jewish] Palestine, and Mexico,” the center of a people’s “resurgence” and pursuit of “self-determination.”²⁹ It had drawn tens of thousands of migrants from the rural South. It was, not least, a refuge. Locke’s Howard University colleagues would frequent the Hotel Theresa (the “Harlem Waldorf”) in order to escape the oppressive condition of Jim Crow in the nation’s capital city, Washington, D.C.

African Americans might earn PhDs at Harvard, thus demonstrating the validity of the laws of race development. At the same time, they were denied a role in the white profession and university system and were instead forced to create their own journals and associations.³⁰ In 1963, historian John Hope Franklin described the reality of the conditions under which he and his more senior colleagues still labored within the white academy. “When he is remembered at all he is all too often an afterthought. When his work is recognized it is usually pointed as the work of a Negro…. Such recognition is as much the product of the racist mentality as the Negro restrooms in the Montgomery airport are.”³¹ Even this subordinate form of “recognition” was too much for some white academics. As we will see, the prominence of intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Locke in a movement that asserted black people’s ineluctable right to equality and liberation led influential whites to denounce higher education for African Americans as a misguided experiment gone horribly wrong.

If we tried to plot a normal distribution (bell) curve of beliefs in black people’s capacities for more or less self-determination over the shorter or longer term, we’d fail. The results would skew to the right; that is, against equality. There were white scholars and public intellectuals associated with the new discipline-in-formation who advocated more or less permanent tutelage for darker and inferior people. So T. Lothrop Stoddard, one of the earliest advocates for realism in U.S. foreign relations in the 1920s, proposed the creation of a new representative institution for blacks that would determine policy in matters of exclusive concern to the permanently subordinate race, thus making the House of Representatives and Senate institutions by and for whites alone. Others, including many of the leading race development theorists, could imagine a time a century or two in the future when at least some of the backward peoples would have developed the capacity for self-government. As far as I have been able to determine, however, in the 1920s and 1930s no white international relations scholar argued on either principled or pragmatic grounds for the restoration of black citizenship rights, the dismantling of Jim Crow in the United States, and self-governance, let alone independence, for the colonies. Chicago’s Fredrick L. Schuman and other so-called fellow travelers might have taken such a position had they been pressed, but Schuman did not take such a position in his published work. The shape of the curve would approximate a normal distribution only if we added the positions of African American and Afro-Caribbean thinkers.

Princeton-trained Raymond Leslie Buell was the only professor I could find in the 1920s–1930s who actually engaged with African Americans as intellectuals.³² Buell wrote the discipline’s best-selling textbook International Relations (1925), in which he analyzed the great problems of world order emerging from the “restless energy of Caucasian people” in their “search for new markets” and “demand for cheap labor.” The primary problem was imperialism and the tensions that resulted as white men competed to extend their dominance over inferior races. Whites in settler societies from Canada to New Zealand were also all wrestling with imperialism’s mirror image; that is, the tensions that arose as nonwhites sought entrance into the white man’s country.

Buell quit his Harvard professorship to run the research program of the Foreign Policy Association because he said he wanted to do something meaningful to improve a world of rising tensions between the races. Yet he based his plans for reform of the southern United States on the system in place in South Africa. His mentor, constitutional scholar Edward S. Corwin, a friend of Woodrow Wilson and editor of the influential series in political science that published International Relations, died still waiting to see the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board reversed and segregation brought back to schools.³³ Through the World War II years, and as the professors of international relations began to realign history and theory to meet the needs of the new U.S. national security state, too many of them continued to uphold the so-called color line rather than engage critically with the problem of hierarchy and modern world order in the ways that Alain Locke and other renaissance thinkers pioneered.

The Howard School

Explicating the relationship of racism to imperialism was an abiding concern of the scholars that comprised the Howard school of international relations. They include Locke (Ph.D., Harvard 1918), the Philadelphia-born intellectual powerhouse who won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford in 1907 (the first and only black awardee for another fifty-six years) and a primary challenger of central tenets of race development theory.³⁴ The Nobel Prize–winning Ralph Bunche was a onetime radical Marxist thinker (PhD Harvard 1934) who joined the Howard faculty in 1928, a year after graduating from UCLA. His close comrade on the faculty, E. Franklin Frazier (PhD Chicago 1931), studied at Clark and did pioneering work on the black bourgeoisie. They clashed off and on with the pan-Africanist protégé of Du Bois, Rayford Logan (PhD Harvard 1936), who joined the history department in 1938. Bunche, Frazier, and Locke brought the Trinidad-born Eric Williams (DPhil Oxford 1938), whose work upended moralist explanations for the end of the slave trade, to Howard’s political science department. He later became first prime minister of independent Trinidad and Tobago. And Logan invited Ohio-born Merze Tate (PhD Radcliffe 1941), the first black woman to receive a doctorate in international relations, to join the history department after Williams and Bunche opposed her hire (and that of a second woman) in political science.

My use of the term Howard school harks back the 1990s turn toward speaking about a distinct Italian school of international relations theory inspired by the work of Antonio Gramsci. That label is artificial and complicated: the Italian school scholars did not all use Gramscian ideas in the same way to the same ends, and some identified in this way rejected the label.³⁵ The same is true about the Howard school theorists and their evolving ideas about racism and imperialism; doubtless they would have rejected the label too. Nonetheless, the Howard school thinkers stand out for their early and relentless critiques of the supposed truths of racial science and the role racism played in sustaining imperialism. They also stand out for the connections they forged—unique among their generation of professors—with the theoreticians of liberation and the future leaders of independent Africa and the island nations of the Caribbean. So despite their intellectual and political differences, they represent a critical counternetwork to the networks dedicated to upgrading the institutions of colonial rule that white professors forged with the so-called Geneva institutions in the era of the League of Nations.

The silence about (that is to say, ignorance of) the Howard school scholars and their work on world politics confirms a central insight of Toni Morrison’s “Black Matters.” She says that after World War II the American academy took to ignoring racism instead of facing its history and ongoing effects. She calls it “a graceful, even generous liberal gesture” on the part of literary critics who remained silent about practices of exclusion and subordination that are present in the history of letters, the construction of literary canons that entirely excluded African American authors, and the criticisms deemed worth making about the canonical texts, but the point can be generalized, as I demonstrate here.³⁶ Virtually every history of international relations to date turns out to be about white political scientists teaching in white departments and publishing in white journals. The race blindness is almost certainly unselfconscious. That’s Morrison’s point. Nor would it surprise her to learn that in the past fifty years the only serious discussions within international relations of Du Bois, Alain Locke, and the handful of other African American theorists of international relations are by the smaller handful of African Americans and Afro Caribbeans who taught international relations beginning in the early 1970s and who teach it today.³⁷ It turns out that identity matters to the most basic practices of discipline making.³⁸

While what I have called the “norm against noticing” explains much of the variance, additional factors are at work that make it harder rather than easier to identify any of the Howard school theorists with the emerging discipline of international relations.³⁹ One is the unavailability of some critical texts. Bunche’s World View of Race was not reissued as part of the effort to “restore his reputation,” as Arnold Rampersand put it, with the airing on the Public Broadcasting Service of Ralph Bunche: American Odyssey (2001, dir. William Greaves).⁴⁰ Bunche had disowned his fifteen-year-old study of racism and imperialism in 1950, the year he won his Nobel peace prize and was named a vice president of the American Political Science Association (He served as its president in 1954.). The real revelation is Alain Locke and his controversial 1915 and 1916 Howard lectures on race development, which were not published until 1992. Similarly, the report he wrote in 1928 for the Foreign Policy Association on the League of Nations mandate system was not unearthed from the archives until 2012. Merze Tate’s dissections of the failed arms control efforts of the early twentieth century and her histories of imperialist rivalries in the Pacific are also out of print, and four additional completed studies of imperialism in Australasia and Africa languish in her archive.

The more fundamental factor in accounting for the time it has taken to identify, contextualize, and wrestle with the ideas of the Howard school is that a critical mass of African American scholars did not emerge in Cold War international relations in the 1970s and 1980s. This was so despite the significant resources committed to building interdisciplinary African American Studies programs and departments at leading colleges and universities as a way to introduce “non-White subject matter in the curriculum,” increase minority enrollment, and create a demand for black faculty.⁴¹ The absence from international relations of all three—black faculty, students, and theory—is a striking difference from disciplines such as English, anthropology (which has since taught us a great deal about the relationship between colonialism and racism), and history (which shares borders with international relations and where nonetheless a virtual barrier has prevented the migration of a two-decade-old scholarship on race and U.S. foreign policy making). In the intervening decades these other fields have produced truer accounts of their own development, reorganized their curricula (at least in part), recognized the force of racism, and, of course, adopted the critiques and once-heretical ideas put forward by black thinkers from outside the segregated white institutions. In the case of international relations, as we will see, a weak challenge from within was contained, preserving the discipline as a white redoubt.

It might have been different. Certainly the divide between African American studies and international relations was not nearly as wide during the first decade of demonstrations, building takeovers, and demands for black and “Third World” studies as it is now. In African American studies today, each of the Howard school thinkers has a biographer and, with the exception of Merze Tate, an important position in the revisionist pantheon of “founders” of the new field.⁴² African American studies is now the primary if posthumous home of Du Bois (in the way that sociology often claims Karl Marx as a “founder”) and his interlocutors Locke and Frazier, who receive secondary appointments for their signal contributions to the interdisciplinary study of race. The posthumous appointments of Bunche and Logan were delayed for a while. That is because Logan, the onetime pan-Africanist went to his grave opposing black studies (and black identity), while Bunche, who had always rejected racial identification as the basis for organizing in the political arena, had come to be seen as an enemy rather than an ally of worldwide black liberation in the 1960s.

This book recovers some of the lost social scientific context and specifically international relations content of the work of Locke and his colleagues. We are fighting against the tide of the Cold War; the embrace in the African American intellectual community, as elsewhere, of the rewritten past of empire (it never happened); the “Americanist” cast of the departments and centers (to which black internationalism is a reaction), the juggernaut of academic specialization; and, not least, the distorting and flattening effects of all those African American studies lectures, syllabi, qualifying exams, and the like in the intervening decades.

A Minor in African American Studies

African American and Africana Studies departments and programs in U.S. universities emerged out of the demonstrations, takeovers of administration buildings, and so forth on American campuses in the late 1960s, when a student movement arose to demand the inclusion of “black studies” in the curriculum.⁴³ Some institutions still call the relevant administrative unit the “Department of Black Studies” and the undergraduate course of study the “major in Black Studies.” As historian Martha Biondi shows, a fundamental objective in creating black studies was to expose the racism and thus the false claims that underpinned so-called objective and detached scholarship in the disciplines. The critical tool for doing so was to bring black people into history and theory, not just as subjects but also as sources of truer accounts of the world.⁴⁴

Those who founded the first programs, departments, and professional associations emphasized the inescapable interdisciplinary nature of any systematic inquiry into the “development of people of African descent,” to quote from the description of the major at Wesleyan University today. Where the exigencies of the Cold War, the needs of the new national security state, and the instrumentalism of foundation officials (from Carnegie to some extent but primarily from the Ford Foundation) drove the building of area studies centers and departments, the demand for Africana studies, in contrast, emerged “from below” and paved the way for women’s and ethnic studies.⁴⁵ The Ford Foundation spent millions in the 1970s and 1980s on advanced research and teaching capacity, hoping to institutionalize its preferred academic model for what it called Afro-American studies.⁴⁶

According to sociologist Fabio Rojas, who surveyed faculty and universities across the United States, as of the early 2000s, African American studies had survived institutional and intellectual conflicts over legitimacy (and budget lines) to secure a “niche” at “highly prestigious universities.” Following Temple University’s lead in 1988, the number of PhD programs have increased, albeit slowly. As of 2014 there are a dozen institutions where one can earn a PhD in Africana or black or African American Studies. At the same time, only about 10 percent of four-year colleges and universities offer undergraduate or graduate degrees, and most such programs are small and are often cobbled together through joint appointments. Rojas estimates that a typical department includes seven professors, at least some of whom will have home departments in, for example, history or English. The majority of programs offer bachelor but not master or doctoral degrees.

The boundaries of belonging in African American studies are highly porous in comparison, say, to economics, leading Rojas to call it “a permanent interdiscipline.”⁴⁷ Nonetheless, in the case of international relations we have a good example of another discipline that until the 1960s or so continued to emphasize (or express anxiety about) both its necessarily “interdisciplinary” character and porous borders with history, political science, area studies, economics, geography, and so forth. Unlike African American studies, no one in the United States thinks of international relations as a permanent interdiscipline. Rather, at most universities international relations now exists formally as a group of specialists (a “subfield” in the profession’s argot) within political science departments.

In the course of transmutation from a radical social movement in the 1960s–1970s to academic specialization in the 1980s–1990s, the American in African American studies increasingly drove teaching and research in the field. On the one hand, Biondi emphasizes the internationalist (or better) anti-imperialist commitments of the “student generation” and their solidarity with African or Third World liberation movements. On the other hand, Rojas’s early 2000s survey reports the relatively low ranking accorded Padmore’s Pan-Africanism or Communism (1955, reissued in 1972) in a list of would-be canonical texts headed by Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.⁴⁸ Biondi also documents how early leaders of the black studies movement faced serious pushback from foundation officials, university administrations, and hostile white faculty as they tried to combine “the study of continental Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States.”⁴⁹

The strongest evidence of the Americanist tilt in the prestige departments—that is, away from the orientation in solidarity with colonial peoples and from the theorizing of the racism/imperialism nexus—is the recent campaign to “internationalize” the study of Aframerica through a renewed emphasis on hemispheric and trans-Atlantic movements of peoples and ideas.⁵⁰ This is an instance of a more widespread challenge to “the naturalization” of the American nation-state, or “methodological nationalism,” one that is still under way across the more humanistic zones of the human sciences.⁵¹ In 1998, anthropologist Jane Guyer, then at Northwestern University, unearthed the correspondence between her distinguished predecessor and the founder of Northwestern’s African studies program, Melville Herskovits, and the Carnegie and Ford Foundations. He had tried to raise funds for a combined, Atlantic Ocean–spanning program in “Negro and African Studies.”⁵²

Back to the Future

Herskovits’s design is a road not taken for Cold War–era Africa “area” studies, African American area studies from below, and, for that matter, for the one area never included on the Social Science Research Council’s wartime maps of future “world areas” research, namely, the United States. It is, nonetheless, the model that was used in the 1920s when American race development theorists and their partners in Australia, Canada, China, Hawaii, Korea, Japan, and New Zealand launched the most important research organization in international relations of the interwar years, the Institute of Pacific Relations. Howard’s Ralph Bunche attended the institute’s Mont-Tremblant conference in 1942 while he was on leave from the university and was working for the Office of Strategic Services. Later he would claim that at the 1942 meeting, the deliberations—which by then had expanded to include Indian nationalists, among others—helped to lay the foundation for the future UN trusteeship system negotiated in San Francisco in 1945.⁵³

Tufts political scientist Pearl Robinson, the president of the Association of African Studies in 2007, has done yeoman’s work in commemorating Bunche’s contribution as pioneering “Africanist,” a field that she traces back to the 1880s.⁵⁴ Bunche did fieldwork in Togo and Dahomey, but he also did fieldwork in what we now know as Indonesia. Had Secretary of State Cordell Hull not overridden the color line in the State Department to appoint him associate chief of the Division of Dependent Area Affairs (under Alger Hiss), Bunche might be remembered now as a pioneering Asianist, since he had already secured funding to head a two-year study for the Institute of Pacific Relations on the future of the Indonesian independence movement.

What Bunche was—and, surely, self- and collective professional identifications then in play trump the ones waiting to be invented—was a specialist in comparative colonial administration, a field in which an ambitious Harvard government department offered the PhD in the 1920s. The field exam, which Raymond Leslie Buell and his colleagues devised, is as good an artifact as any—many more will be found in the pages to follow—of the lost world of the then-new science of international relations in the United States. Du Bois and Locke were engaged with its problems from the start, as second-class citizens to be sure, and things would get worse in the segregated departments and associations before they eventually got better.

Harvard historian William E. Langer (PhD Clark 1923) headed the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Bunche had joined Langer’s team as the British Empire Section’s Africa expert, which is what led to his attending the Institute on Pacific Relation’s Mont-Tremblant meeting. Langer launched his career as one of the young professors associated with the George Hubbard Blakeslee group at Clark, the founders of the new Journal of Race Development, another of those artifacts that we can use to recreate the lost world of the innovators at Harvard, Columbia, and elsewhere who were seeking solutions to the policy dilemmas that “modern” imperialism had produced. The most pressing policy problems arose, the first professors of international relations said, from the extension of the American colonial model in New Mexico and other territories to the new Caribbean and Pacific dependencies. They took great care to emphasize what was “new” about the causes, nature, and consequences of contemporary imperialism, thereby distinguishing the object and defining the boundaries of a new interdisciplinary space separate from the “traditional” concerns of the international lawyers or the antiquarian scholars of ancient Greece and Rome.

Langer also played a role as his teachers and friends oversaw the transition of the Journal of Race Development/International Relations to its new owners, the Council on Foreign Relations. He served as editorial assistant to the new editor of Foreign Affairs, Archibald Cary Coolidge, who was Blakeslee’s teacher and another of the leading figures in the new discipline, and he also later took over the book review section from Clark’s Harry Elmer Barnes. What made Langer’s reputation and led to his appointment as the inaugural Coolidge Professor of History in 1936, however, was the publication the year before of the highly praised two-volume Diplomacy of Imperialism. Although it is virtually impossible to name a leading international relations scholar in the 1920s and 1930s who did not write on the topic of empire, Langer’s study stood out for its critical reconsideration of the 30-year-old work by British economist John Hobson, Imperialism (1902). Langer repackaged the critique of Hobson as a stand-alone article in Foreign Affairs. Thirty years later, Merze Tate’s editor had her cut a long first chapter on theories of imperialism from her newest book. Readers wouldn’t be interested, he told her. Tate’s dissertation supervisor meanwhile had confidentially advised the Rockefeller Foundation against even funding her study. As “far as her field of International Relations is concerned” the history of imperial rivalries in the Pacific was of little significance, he wrote.⁵⁵ The book never appeared. That act was a clear harbinger of the world we live in now.

Today a vast gulf divides international relations from Africana studies. It is wider certainly than the walk across Harvard Yard that gets you from the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs to the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research or to and from the high-rises, glass boxes, repurposed American Craftsmen bungalows, Gothic towers, and landmark Minoru Yamasaki buildings that house the two departments on other campuses. We could measure that distance in multiple ways, I suspect. There is little if any overlap in the students in the introductory courses, few if any double majors in an era when double majors are the norm, and the professors in the two disciplines have taken disparate paths to their respective PhDs—English or history or sociology first degrees in the case of Africana studies and political science in the overwhelming majority of cases in international relations. Citation counts would make the division clear as well. Or we can consider a simple anecdote. Du Bois, a giant of American arts, letters, and the social sciences, served on the editorial board of the Journal of Race Development and continued to publish on Africa in the successor publications. None of today’s premier public intellectuals and leaders in the discipline Du Bois is said to have inspired—Michael Eric Dyson, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Cornel West—writes for Foreign Affairs.⁵⁶ It is not a criticism. It is an observation that helps explain the large gaps in the posthumously revised curricula vitae of the members of the Howard school.

Meanwhile, in quadrants where Foreign Affairs is sometimes mistaken for a peer-reviewed journal, practitioners of international relations unselfconsciously reproduce the views of those in the humanities a generation ago.⁵⁷ Political scientists typically understand the tradition of international relations scholarship to be race blind. States, not races, have always been the discipline’s basic unit of analysis. The “security dilemma” leaders confront is the timeless problem that constitutes international relations as a discipline, based on ideas the practitioners now routinely trace back to the ancient wisdom of Thucydides and Machiavelli, unaware that the genealogy is an invention of the Cold War years. The specialists contend, further, that if people of color are not read or taught it is because they have not written books and articles that shaped the field or that matter to others working in it now. It cannot be because the hierarchical structures Americans have built, including the discipline itself, using the biologically false idea of race, are to blame.

My study of the Howard school thinkers and their entanglements with the white social scientific world shows how and why these political scientists have gotten it wrong. Consider William Langer’s autobiography, In and Out of the Ivory Tower, which appeared in 1977, on the eve of his death and in the same year Merze Tate, one of the first political scientists to work on arms control retired from Howard. Reviewing the start of his long career in Worcester and Cambridge and his role in launching Foreign Affairs, Langer thought it important to explain how in those days “international relations meant race relations.”⁵⁸ Back then the Howard school theorists were the main source of dissent in a rigidly segregated profession regarding the pseudoscientific foundations of the new discipline and the most important center for theorizing the feasible alternatives to continued dependency and domination in the decades before 1960.

Where We Go From Here

I have organized the book chronologically, in four parts, divided into nine chapters. It is a history of the men, overwhelmingly, who argued about race and empire in the course of building institutions inside and outside the white academy in order to advance the new science of international relations. The ideas are known (by some), but not in this context. The institutions themselves are mostly unknown, although they matter a lot, since there is really no other way to define the discipline given, at least through the 1950s, an inability otherwise to distinguish what they did from other social scientists, as those same men routinely admitted. It is also a crowded cast of relatively unknown teachers, researchers, and academic entrepreneurs, so to make the narrative easier to follow, each of the four parts focuses primarily on a distinct pair of scholars: W. E. B. Du Bois and John William Burgess (1898 to World War I), Alain Locke and Raymond Leslie Buell (the interwar era), Ralph Bunche and Edward Mead Earle (World War II), and Rayford Logan and Harold Isaacs (the 1950s). The last chapter is the exception, appropriately, in that it turns to recount the career of Merze Tate.

Part I begins with the responses of the social sciences to America’s conquest of Cuba, Guam, Hawaii, and the Philippines in 1898.⁵⁹ Imperialism’s new era had led to profound divisions across the disciplines, as reflected in the organization of the American Political Science Association in 1903. Chapter 1 discusses the progressives who led the association and their efforts to advance the theory and practice of colonial administration. The imperial turn had multiplied the country’s race problems, which, many argued, posed new threats to the continued hegemony or even survival of whites, precisely as the anti-imperialists had warned. John W. Burgess, the giant of late nineteenth-century political science, was one of the most outspoken critics. As a consequence he ended his career as an outcast from rather than leader of the new APSA.⁶⁰

Chapter 2 turns from institutions to ideas. In the new science of international relations, the biological division of the world mattered much more for theory building than a territorial division, but the territorial division that mattered most was that between the so-called tropic and temperate zones of the world economy. These boundaries dictated the path of race development: they had done so in the past through colonization by Anglo-Saxons and would do so in the future through control over and enhancement of the labor power of the semi-civilized races using techniques of uplift. International lawyers might have regarded the boundaries between (the small set of) states (to which the law of nations applied) as essential to their art, but political scientists defined themselves above all by their difference from lawyers, and in building a science of imperial administration they turned to Herbert Spencer, August Comte, William Graham Sumner, Benjamin Kidd, and John Wesley Powell, not Hugo Grotius. At the same time, Du Bois and his heirs in the Howard school would begin to insist that history, not biology, explained hierarchy, specifically the history of colonial and mercantile capitalist expansion and of the transatlantic slave trade that secured Western people’s dominance and African, Asian, and Caribbean people’s subordination.

Part II situates the beginning of the Howard school relative to the other main developments in the social science of international relations in the 1920s, a decade marked by an increased focus on imperialism, white supremacy, and the prospects of race war. Chapter 3 discusses the rising anxieties across the so-called Anglosphere as movements of “colored peoples” began to demand the end of their subjugation. Alain Locke was a leading philosopher of the freedom movements and an indefatigable promoter of the Howard school. Chapter 4 focuses on institution building, including the Institute of Pacific Relations and the Williamstown Institute of Politics, the Social Science Research Council’s first Committee on International Relations in 1926, and New York’s Foreign Policy Association, a progressive counterpart to the Council on Foreign Relations with a well-funded research program headed by former Harvard professor Raymond Leslie Buell. Howard’s international relations theorists would depend on Buell’s brokerage for their entry to white society, but what defined their opportunities in contrast to denizens of virtually all other centers of international relations theorizing was Alain Locke’s tireless publishing and networking and, through him, wholly unique connections to national liberation movement theorists and future leaders of independent African and Caribbean states.

Part III extends the account through the years of depression and war, and thus through the shroud of myths that Cold War–era scholars spun about “idealism” and “isolationism” (and, as one of the converts, William T. R. Fox, would add, “devil theories of international relations” that cast “munitions-makers, imperialists, and capitalists” as evildoers).⁶¹ Chapter 5 focuses on the rival Marxisms of Du Bois and his most caustic critic, Ralph Bunche. Chapter 6 details the efforts by the discipline’s would-be grand strategists to quarantine the Howard school theorists and their dangerous ideas about the future of black rights at home and in the colonies.

Part IV traces the impact of what MIT’s Harold Isaacs (and, later, Malcolm X) called “the breakdown of the worldwide system of white supremacy” on a discipline in the process of its own dramatic reconfiguration. International relations became the site of study of the relationships among the “white states” or, as the “biological myth,” in Hans Kohn’s words, gave way to the “spatial myth,” the “great powers.” As we will see, among some of the more politically reactionary grand strategists the biological myth still held sway. Younger and more liberal professors in contrast, would insist, just as Raymond Leslie Buell did in 1925, using his exact words in fact, that the new era of complex interdependence was different from some imagined older and obsolete one.

Those who took up the discipline’s actual old object of study (what Reinhold Niebuhr, the new prophet of realism, called “the colored continents”) did so, it came to be imagined, “for the first time” under an entirely new interdisciplinary specialization called variously “area studies,” “development,” or “modernization” theory.⁶² In other words, hierarchy was now encoded in the architecture of the postwar research university. Accordingly, Chapter 7 shows that the bulk of foundation funds flowed to the proliferating area studies centers and research projects in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. One of the unwritten agenda items in the late turn to building African studies and a national African Studies Association—which happened late, since few in the United States imagined the possibility of Africans governing themselves—was keeping governance of the field in the hands of white social scientists and foundation administrators.

Chapter 8 turns to the writing and reception of The New World of Negro Americans, the results of a research project at MIT’s newly established Center for International Studies that contrasted sharply with the bulk of MIT’s contract research, economic development planning for various new states of Asia, and what came to be known as modernization theory. Harold Isaacs used his friend Logan at Howard, among others, to set up dozens of interviews with black writers, researchers, doctors, and lawyers in order to assess the impact of African decolonization on African American identity and the direction of the civil rights struggle.

Howard’s political scientists carved out a unique niche for themselves in a still deeply segregated and unequal discipline in part through Buell’s patronage, Locke’s entrepreneurship, and Bunche’s ambition and in part because the white departments and programs were still operating with modest outside funding at best, most of which dried up in the depression years of the 1930s. The tremendous expansion of foundation support for international and area studies centers after the war did not reach the schools and scholars that had pioneered the study of colonialism and liberation movements in Africa. Thus, chapter 9 traces the effects of the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the decision in Brown v. Board of Education on a cluster of innovative thinkers in international relations who for a brief period rivaled those at any white institution in the segregated academy.

A brief conclusion reviews the findings and dismisses as a diversion the question that graduate students and professors in international relations, rubbed raw by what they read, will typically fall back on, “How does this matter for theory?” The answer already exists for anyone who really cares. The question they ought to ask instead is this: How does it matter in those domains where what professors do actually makes a difference: the classroom, the department, the campus, and the professional association?