The History of White People (32 page)

In addition, an articulate liberal-minded cohort of freethinkers, social workers, and settlement house workers had firsthand knowledge of the poor European immigrants who were being racialized and denigrated. Living out the promise of progressivism, liberals were gaining influence in the public sphere. Immigrants, their children, their institutions, and their friends—and their employers—together created a climate more favorable to immigration, even toward working people and the poor.
²⁶
Shying from controversy and content to leave well enough alone, Presidents William Taft and Woodrow Wilson each vetoed bills containing literacy tests.

American political culture was moving into the Progressive Era, and Boas’s own circle reflected the change. Boas had long prided himself on his family’s “Forty-eighter”
*
liberalism, and his wife came from a free-thinking Austrian Catholic family. A friend, Felix Adler, had founded the Society for Ethical Culture, and Boas’s Forty-eighter uncle Abraham Jacobi and his friend Carl Schurz championed reform, especially addressing the needs of poor children. Boas’s friends also included feminist progressives like Frances Kellor, Victoria Earle Matthews, and Mary White Ovington. His students, such as Melville Herskovits, Otto Klineberg, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mead, and Ashley Montagu, investigated non-Anglo-Saxons and stressed the crucial role of environment in human culture.
²⁷

It mattered that so many of the settlement house workers and moral reformers advocating public health and social services for the poor were educated women—the very women Theodore Roosevelt hectored over their duty to breed. Turning away from the nineteenth-century pattern of charity intended to correct personal weaknesses, they recognized the structural causes of poverty. Localities, states, and even the federal government, they said, owed the population certain services as rights, because environment, not inherent weakness, made people poor. When the environment changed for the better, then people would improve.

P
OPULAR CULTURE
played a leading role in this high point of progressivism. While the Immigration Commission gathered data and Boas measured heads, the American theater rode a wave of fascination with settlement houses and immigrants. A play called
The Melting Pot
opened in Washington, D.C., in October 1908 to Theodore Roosevelt’s praise, and moved on to long runs in Chicago and New York. Its author, the English Jewish immigrant Israel Zangwill, celebrates the creation of Americans out of immigrants in a melodramatic version of Boas’s graphs and tables of immigrant assimilation.
^†

The plot of
The Melting Pot
revolves around two characters who, unbeknownst to each other, have emigrated from the same Russian village of Kishinev (in modern Moldova, between Romania and Ukraine). Vera Ravendal, an aristocratic, revolutionary Christian, now works in a New York settlement house; David Quixano, a Jewish musician and composer, has witnessed the slaughter of his parents in the most infamous of the Russian pogroms, the trauma that drove him to the United States. The supporting cast includes David’s Orthodox uncle and aunt, a German symphony conductor, the Quixano family’s Irish domestic servant, and a nouveau riche American playboy. Although Zangwill places the Quixanos among the despised Ashkenazi “east European Hebrew” masses of early twentieth-century immigrants, he gives them a Sephardic name evoking a more prestigious Iberian history. Benjamin Disraeli, the late British prime minister, had given his characters Sephardic ancestry in novels written before his prime ministership in 1868.
²⁸
*

When Vera and David fall in love in
The Melting Pot
, they find that old country rages are still boiling. Vera’s father, it turns out, had led the pogrom that killed David’s parents, and David’s uncle Mendel cannot forgive either the assailant or the descendant of a murderer. In America, however, Vera is free to understand David’s feelings better than his uncle, and the New World allows the young people to transcend their pasts. Vera and David agree to marry without sacrificing either of their religions.

The play ends on the Fourth of July with a rousing performance of David’s “American Symphony.” As David and Vera watch the sun set behind the Statue of Liberty, they celebrate the American melting pot:

A
LL IN
all, questions of immigration and assimilation were a muddle between 1890 and 1914. The promise of assimilation exemplified by Boas and Zangwill encouraged Americans of a welcoming turn of mind. Conversely, Ripley’s idea of three separate European races, with lines deeply etched between them, held more power. Two emblematic figures, the patrician president Theodore Roosevelt and the scholar Edward A. Ross, enunciated the thinking of most educated early twentieth-century Americans who feared that immigrants would defile their America. This was thoroughly racist thinking, directed toward races that were white.

W
ell-born, impeccably educated, and a master communicator, Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) never lost sight of race as the driving force of human history, especially of his “American race.” (See figure 17.1, Theodore Roosevelt.) In books and articles throughout his public life, Roosevelt could alter his emphases depending on the political context, but he was always a leading race thinker of his times.
*
And he got started early.

As a youngster, Roosevelt admired the heroics depicted in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Saga of King Olaf” in
Tales of a Wayside Inn
(1863). During a summer in Dresden, Germany, when he was fourteen, Roosevelt was exposed to the
Nibelungenlied
(that pagan German saga of Siegfried the dragon slayer), deepening his sense of Teutonic heritage.
¹
Later, as an undergraduate at Harvard, he absorbed the ideas of American racial greatness and immigrant inferiority from Professor Nathaniel Southgate Shaler of Kentucky and came to agree with Shaler on a popular tenet of American race talk. Like so many other old-line Americans, Roosevelt easily saw the figure of this tall, slender Kentuckian as the quintessential native American. And in graduate studies at Columbia, Roosevelt also absorbed the Teutonist notions of John W. Burgess, another conservative admirer of all things German.

Fig. 17.1. Theodore Roosevelt as Master of the World.

Roosevelt’s rise in politics proved vertiginous. A Republican by birth, he was appointed assistant secretary of the navy in 1898, at age thirty, a stint followed by volunteer service in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. His well-publicized war record helped him get elected governor of New York and, in 1900, placed as vice president on a Republican ticket headed by William McKinley. Roosevelt was forty-two years old when he became president after McKinley’s assassination in 1901. Serving as a progressive, even a trust-busting president between 1901 and 1909, he returned to politics as the presidential nominee of the Progressive Party in the 1912 campaign that brought the Democrat Woodrow Wilson to the White House.

During this entire time Roosevelt spoke and wrote tirelessly, starting off with a series of Teutonist histories and biographies:
The Naval War of 1812
(1882),
Thomas Hart Benton
(1887),
Gouverneur Morris
(1888), and
The Winning of the West
(1889–96).
²
The American Historical Association (AHA) acknowledged his contribution to the writing of history by electing him president in 1912. This selection was unsurprising, since Roosevelt had succeeded wildly as a historian. Moreover, as a strident Teutonist, he fit in well with his AHA predecessors: the Boston Brahmin-statesman-historian George Bancroft in 1886, the industrialist turned award-winning historian James Ford Rhodes in 1899, the Boston Brahmin grandson and great-grandson of presidents Charles Francis Adams in 1901, the Anglo-Saxonist, imperialist historian Alfred Thayer Mahan in 1902, and Roosevelt’s Harvard classmate and friend the Harvard history professor Albert Bushnell Hart in 1909.
*

Echoing Carlyle’s Norse theme in the 1880s, Roosevelt’s
Thomas Hart Benton
hails the “most war-like race” those hardy frontiersmen, conquerors of the West like “so many Norse Vikings.” Echoing Emerson in
English Traits
, Roosevelt practically savors the “hideous brutality” of warfare against the Indians. Indeed, Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for virile violence knows few bounds. Intrepid Americans who take over Texas merge into Emersonian Norsemen as “Norse sea-rovers,” “a ship-load of Knut’s followers,” and “Rolf’s Norsemen on the seacoast of France.” Roosevelt pictures Sam Houston as an “old world Viking” whose life as a whole emerges “as picturesque and romantic as that of Harold Hardraada himself.”
^3
†

Thus, early on, Roosevelt bought into much of the Teutonic hypothesis of American governmental institutions, but not quite all of it. Others, such as the Reverend Josiah Strong, were jubilantly predicting the universal reign of the Anglo-Saxon at the expense of all other races. Strong’s book
Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis
(1886) primed Americans for a final conflict between Anglo-Saxons and others, with, presumably, Irish and other Celts on the losing side.
⁴
It sold 175,000 copies in a generation.

Not quite so narrow, Roosevelt acknowledged the mixed racial nature of Britons and Americans—race, of course, meaning the European races alone. In what today seem like trivial nuances, Roosevelt usually termed his superior race “English-speaking,” rather than simply “English.” Nonetheless, his reasoning made “native Americans”—that is, Anglo-Saxon Protestants—uniquely suited racially for self-government, thanks to their Teutonic heritage. Everybody who was anybody could agree on that. Of course, as with all race talk, conflicting assumptions and disparate conclusions arose. A century ago they could draw blood.

Controversy reigned over whether Americans or Englishmen or even Germans had inherited the self-governing genius of medieval German forests. The English Anglo-Saxonist E. A. Freeman chose his own England, but accepted Americans into his race club. Herbert Baxter Adams, holder of a Ph.D. from Heidelberg (most American race theorists studied in Germany at one time or another), taught at Johns Hopkins. A prideful New Englander, he planted medieval Germans’ descendants in New England, rather bypassing England itself. The Harvard Ph.D. and young congressman Henry Cabot Lodge, a New Englander of self-proclaimed Norman French heritage, saw much virtue in the Norman contribution to England, yet spoke often and easily of “the English race.” Following Carlyle, Lodge saw Normans as Saxons who happened to speak French and therefore as full-blooded Teutons. John W. Burgess, a political scientist at Columbia University, had spent 1870–73 studying at Göttingen. Burgess held that Germans monopolized racial and political superiority, even down to his own times.

More than a little distrust crept into race theory with regard to present-day Germans. As imperial rivalries raged in early twentieth-century Europe, Burgess pushed for a political alliance of the “Teutonic” powers of Germany, England, and the United States against France. But Lodge distrusted both Britain and Germany. Roosevelt, meanwhile, shied away from Germany, calling it the land of “swinish German king-lets who let out their subjects to do hired murder, and battened on the blood and sweat of the wretched beings under them.”
⁵
The lawyer, philosopher, and social Darwinist historian John Fiske, the leading American popularizer of Anglo-Saxonism, held, “We New Englanders are the offsprings of Alfred’s England,” but nonetheless, “we—the English—are at least three-quarters Celtic…. I believe that in blood, we are quite as near to the French as to the German—probably more so.” Most other turn-of-the-century Teutonists (like Emerson earlier) thought the French stood for all that was alien to the democratic, but not revolutionary, Anglo-Saxon genius. Even Henry Cabot Lodge, the self-proclaimed Cabot descendant, made his French ancestors into Saxons, the better to admire the Germans of Tacitus and Caesar.
⁶
And so it went. Tempests we now set in a teapot, but at the time a big, important pot of tea.

Like the majority of his contemporaries, Roosevelt made race (not, say, class) the major force of human history, but his notion of American race changed over time. In his early work, Americans and Englishmen are much the same race, a product of German, Irish, and Norse combining in the British Isles. In admitting the Irish admixture, Roosevelt parted ways with some of his fellow Teutonists. His teacher Burgess, for instance, had locked the Irish out of the Teutonic race, and Roosevelt’s friend Henry Cabot Lodge initially had hard words for the Irish. Politics, where the Irish represented a potent force, made all the difference. After Lodge entered politics, he like Roosevelt came around as his Irish American constituents forced him to soften this critique.

Darwinian evolution proved more problematic. A progressive thinker, Roosevelt accepted the validity of evolution but gave it his own, racial spin. As he pondered the great sweep of English and American history, he agreed with other modern scientific thinkers, including Ripley, that Darwin had to be right. But any evolutionary change would occur only very, very, very slowly and, crucially, in terms of what we now more easily see as culture: a race must surely require a thousand years or more to develop temperamentally to the level of Teutons. But once thus formed, fine traits would be passed along within the race. Thus, Americans of Teutonic descent possessed “that union of strong, virile qualities…that inestimable quality, so characteristic of their race, hard-headed common sense.” Perhaps other races, even southern Italians, would evolve in their turn, but evolution to a superior level could not take place anytime soon. Woodrow Wilson, the Princeton political scientist and future president, agreed. The superior “English race” had risen through “slow circumstance.”
⁷
*
So must all the others, by patiently waiting their turn.

According to this psycho-cultural notion of evolution, temperament trumped all, but the right temperament was under siege, as the census of 1890 made clear. The wrong people were increasing, and the right people were not.

Roosevelt first glimpsed danger in the early 1890s, as did Francis Amasa Walker, in the declining birthrate among old-stock New Englanders. French Canadians migrating to jobs in the American textile industry struck Roosevelt as a dangerous mass “swarming into New England with ominous rapidity.” By 1895 what Roosevelt called the “warfare of the cradle” had intensified. It was becoming ever more difficult to “prevent the higher races from losing their nobler traits and from being overwhelmed by the lower races.”
⁸

“R
ACE SUICIDE
” loomed as an issue “fundamentally infinitely more important than any other question in this country.”
⁹
For Roosevelt, this was not a matter of workers versus capital or the poor versus the rich. It was a kind of race war pitting the higher races of his native Americans against two groups deemed inferior by dint of their heredity: “degenerate” poor white families of native descent and immigrant workers from southern and eastern Europe. (African Americans hardly figured in this discussion, as prominent race thinkers had convinced themselves that
the Negro
was dying out, unfitted as
he
was to live outside of slavery.) As a race publicist in the era of rising worker unrest, Roosevelt dedicated the last decades of his life to exhorting the better classes to reproduce more lustily in order to meet and, he hoped, overcome the demographic competition of their inferiors.

Great slogans are rare, and this one—“race suicide”—though co-opted by Theodore Roosevelt, was not of his invention. Rather, it was coined by the popular and distinguished sociologist Edward A. Ross (1866–1951) in 1901. (See figure 17.2, Edward A. Ross.) In “The Causes of Racial Superiority,” both an address to his colleagues in the social sciences and a widely quoted article in the
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
, Ross stresses something he terms
racial temperament
over biological race.
¹⁰
*
He puts it all together—the dominance of racial temperament, the minor role of biological race, disastrous demographics—producing the catastrophe of “race suicide” looming on the horizon. His emblematic phrase picks up Francis Amasa Walker’s unfavorable demographics and echoes Walker’s wording.

Well before his sloganeering, Ross had scaled the heights of American academia. Receiving his B.S. from Coe College in 1886, he went on to study at the University of Berlin and Johns Hopkins Universities (Ph.D. 1891), then moved around quite a bit. After posts at the Universities of Indiana, Cornell, Stanford, and Nebraska, he capped off a fine career at the University of Wisconsin, the leading American institution in social science.
^†
A founder of sociology in U.S. universities, Ross was elected president of the American Sociological Association in 1914 and 1915. He also excelled as a popularizer of social scientific truth; his books sold half a million copies during his lifetime.
¹¹