The History of White People (23 page)

But while their halcyon days may have gone, their influence lived on. Tutored in German race theory reaching back to Winckelmann and Goethe, each had become his country’s national voice, eloquently equating Americans with Britons and Britons with Saxons. The Anglo-Saxon myth of racial superiority now permeated concepts of race in the United States and virtually throughout the English-speaking world. To be
American
was to be
Saxon
.

I
n the mid-1850s, Emerson cast about for new material and, at the same time, felt a need to get notes from his two European trips into print. Journal entries from those visits in 1833 and 1847–48 contained an abundance of raw material for a book on England and the Saxon race. But to buttress his arguments he read widely in history and science dealing with the race of men (and he did mean
men
) he considered permanent masters of the earth. Like all of Emerson’s books,
English Traits
, which appeared in 1856, collects lectures delivered to various audiences over the course of a decade. Part travelogue, part autobiography, part historical ethnography,
English Traits
heightened his fame and gained appreciation as his wittiest book. Its popularity endured well into the twentieth century, when its racial theories began to fall into disrepute.
¹

Ideas about Saxons and the English people had long percolated in the United States. In his 1835 lecture “Permanent Traits of the English National Genius,” Emerson called attention to the similarities in Americans’ and Englishmen’s appearance—the red and white complexion, blond hair, blue eyes, and tall stature—and, without doubt, ferocious manhood, all admirable traits quite unlike those of small and dark Celts, obviously (for Emerson) Asiatic in origin. These ideas reappeared in his 1843 lecture “Genius of the Anglo-Saxon Race” and in 1852–53 in “Traits and Genius of the Anglo-Saxon Race” and “The Anglo-American.”
²

These oft-repeated lectures made a ready audience for
English Traits
. Within three months of publication, 24,000 copies were in print in the United States and Great Britain, and the book was widely and positively reviewed.
³
Despite its blatant English/Saxon chauvinism—or perhaps because of it—
English Traits
attracted readers of various political persuasions and racial backgrounds. Charlotte Forten, for instance, the daughter of wealthy black Philadelphians and, at nineteen, an abolitionist in her own right, championed the book. Forten, who was living in Massachusetts at the time, bought the book and finished reading it within three weeks of its publication. In February 1857 Forten went to hear Emerson speak on the topic “Works and Days,” which she found enlightening and the person of Emerson intimidating. She liked it, she said, “
very
much. The author’s views of English character are far more liberal than those of American travelers generally. He evidently appreciates dear old England; and, loving her as I do, I like his book and thank him for it with all my heart.”
⁴
The antislavery U.S. senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner, joined Forten and many other Americans in rampant Anglophilia. He pronounced himself attracted by “famous London town,” which he considered downright “bewitching.”
⁵
However clear-minded they might have been about the shortcomings of American society, New Englanders went gaga over the English.

Emerson himself cared little for London society, but he was obsessed with Saxon violence and manly beauty, both of which qualities he lacked. He was, in fact, a tall and skinny man, who, like his friend Thomas Carlyle, suffered from various nervous and bodily ailments throughout his life. As a house-bound intellectual when not lecturing before appreciative audiences, Emerson grew fascinated by the primeval virility of outdoor men of physical strength. Many others shared these anxieties, enough to make scenes of frontier violence staples of popular entertainment in Britain and the United States.
⁶

T
HE CORE
chapter of
English Traits
, called “Race,” begins in measured tones. Emerson enumerates the three components of the English population: first the Celt, to whom he gives less than a paragraph; second, the German, also briefly noted; and third, the “Northmen.” The balance of the chapter revels in ancient Viking history, dominated by traits of personal beauty and bloodthirstiness.

In the remainder of
English Traits
, race becomes ever more defined. The English race may be mixed, but, even so, racial “stock” determines national destiny: the “early history of each tribe show[s] the permanent bias…. In [King] Alfred [the Great of Wessex], in the Northmen, one may read the genius of the English society….” Emerson’s use of breeding terminology like “stock,” anticipates the vocabulary of twentieth-century eugenics.

The “Race” chapter expresses two thoughts rooted in concerns Emerson shared with masses of Americans relishing his themes—two thoughts expressed as content and form. Brutality emerges as the chapter’s prized quality, with manly beauty its outward appearance. As early as 1835 Emerson had praised the men he alternately termed Danes, Norsemen, Saxons, and Anglo-Saxons for their “beastly ferocity.”
⁷
He amplifies this theme in
English Traits
. Bodily strength, vigor, manliness, and energy emerge as natural outgrowths of early Saxon bloodthirstiness, presented lovingly. Nature created Saxons/Norsemen as “a rude race, all masculine, with brutish strength,” endowing their English descendants, in turn, with an “excess of virility.”
⁸

Homicidal history, synonymous to Emerson with gorgeous male energy, comes to life in his two quintessential “Norsemen,” the brothers Horsa and Hengist, legendary founders of Saxon England. Recall that Thomas Jefferson had considered honoring them on the Great Seal of the new United States of America. According to legend, the mid-fifth-century British warlord Vortigern invited the brothers Horsa and Hengist into what is now Kent, in the southeastern tip of England, to wrest the island from its Celtic population and their Roman overlords. A century later the monk Gildas described the tribes of Horsa and Hengist as “vile unspeakable Saxons, hated of God and man alike,” but their reputation rose considerably with the passage of centuries.
⁹

Today Horsa and Hengist are considered Jutes from what is now Denmark, but tradition claims them as founders of the Anglo-Saxon nation that King Alfred raised to greatness in the late ninth century. Emerson ignored particularities of geography and lumped together Norsemen, Jutes, and Saxons as marvelous Scandinavian pirates, “a rude race, all masculine, with brutish strength…. Let buffalo gore buffalo, and the pasture to the strongest!”
¹⁰
Staying over the top, Emerson reveled in the Saxon/Jute/Norse brutality he had discovered in Samuel Laing’s translation of
Heimskringla, or Chronicle of the Kings of Norway
.
*
Though the term “Norsemen” usually refers to people of the far north—that is, to Dark Age Scandinavians in general—Emerson, by drawing on the
Heimskringla
, would seem finally to focus on Norway as the homeland in his theory. Actual German Saxons, in fact, hardly appear in
English Traits
, because, with the exception of Goethe, Emerson questions Germans’ fitness to serve as models of any sort. Along with “the Asiatic races,” he said back in 1835, Germans lack the racial constitution for political greatness, sharing as they do Asians’ political impotence out of “a defect of will.”
¹¹
Norsemen supply the bonny figure of the Englishman American’s ancestor.

Scandinavia might work as the ancestral home of northern whiteness, but Scandinavia of the 1850s created a dilemma: it was backward and really quite poor—a little nothing beside the British behemoth. How could Emerson reconcile that reality with his need for Scandinavian racial (hence permanent) brilliance? If the Norsemen endowed Britain with all its “Saxon” greatness, how to explain the relative obscurity of contemporary Scandinavia? Why had not Norwegians and Danes launched the industrial revolution, grown rich on worldwide commerce, and colonized the globe?

Here Emerson resorts to a favorite metaphor: the fruit tree. Scandinavia, he surmises, lost its best men during the Dark Ages—lost them to England and never recovered: “The continued draught of the best men in Norway, Sweden and Denmark to their piratical expeditions exhausted those countries, like a tree which bears much fruit when young, and these have been second-rate powers ever since. The power of the race migrated and left Norway permanently exhausted.”
¹²
*
It is a lame theory, and Emerson does not lean on it heavily. For his purposes, recent history of his Norsemen
in Scandinavia
need not loom large. The early days sufficed.

Consider his affection for obscure Norwegian kings and princes: “These Norsemen are excellent persons in the main,” says Emerson, “with good sense, steadiness, wise speech, and prompt action. But they have a singular turn for homicide.” Then, in a spirit of great good fun, he goes on to detail their amusements:

B
EAUTY AND
strength, strength and beauty. Entwined they thread through
English Traits
. On succeeding pages Emerson praises “the fair Saxon man” as “handsome” (three times) and associates him with “beauty” (four times). On one page, English and Scandinavians appear as “a handsome race” who “please by beauty” and are “distinguished for beauty” as “handsome captives” in Rome. In support, Emerson notes frequent references to the “personal beauty of its heroes” in the
Heimskringla
.

A century earlier, the Swiss physiognomist Lavater had maintained that outer beauty betokens inner qualities, and Emerson repeats this conviction in
English Traits
. The “English face,” he says, combines “decision and nerve” with “the fair complexion, blue eyes, and open and florid aspect. Hence the love of truth, hence the sensibility, the fine perception, and poetic construction. The fair Saxon man, with open front, and honest meaning…is not the wood out of which cannibal, or inquisitor, or assassin is made, but he is moulded for law, lawful trade, civility, marriage, the nurture of children, for colleges, churches, charities, and colonies.”
¹⁴
He does not explain how Norse assassins turn into loving fathers without losing their racial character of manly brutishness.

Such enthusiasm for physical attractiveness recalls Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s hymns to his lovely Georgian skull, although in Blumenbach’s case, the skull was
female
. Such a progression came naturally to Emerson, educated at the hands of the Germanicists Mary Moody Emerson, George Ticknor, and Edward Everett and immersed in Goethe, all enamored of ancient Greeks as paragons of beauty.
*

Likewise, Horatio Greenough, a young American artist living in Rome. Emerson had met Greenough in Florence in 1833 and gone on in
English Traits
to gush about his “face…so handsome, and his person so well formed,” truly “a votary of the Greeks,” and a good mind to go with his good looks.
¹⁵
Steeped in things Greek, Greenough had written his own
Artist’s Creed
, musings on beauty à la Winckelmann, and he tutored Emerson on the Parthenon marbles in London and much else regarding Greek beauty. The friendship lasted nearly twenty years. Emerson had Greenough over for dinner shortly before the younger man died of brain fever in late 1852, at the age of only forty-seven.
¹⁶

Emerson never fetishized Greeks the way Greenough and many another did, but comments scattered throughout his published and unpublished work reveal an acceptance of Winckelmann’s ideals. In September 1855, for instance, he dedicated a new cemetery in Concord by praising the Greeks, who “loved life and delighted in beauty.” Bodily aesthetics were also central to German education and therefore to Emerson, but therein lay a problem. Blumenbach had coined the race name “Caucasian” as a concept of female beauty, full of feminine connotations of captive powerlessness.
¹⁷

Many earlier intellectuals, certainly Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, and the eighteenth-century Edinburgh philosophers, had associated beauty with smallness, weakness, and women. For Emerson this would not do. He set out to wrench Saxon beauty away from female captives, away from the odalisques of the white slave trade, and away from French academic painting. He wanted the concept of beauty for his bloodthirsty, virile Norsemen. This task he took up in
English Traits
, and it led him to practically homoerotic heights.