Intellectuals and Race Page 5
Those who promoted genetic determinism and eugenics were neither uneducated nor fringe cranks. Quite the contrary. Edward A. Ross, Francis A. Walker and Richard T. Ely all had Ph.D.s from leading universities and were professors at leading universities. Edward A. Ross was the author of 28 books, whose sales were estimated at approximately half a million copies, and he was regarded as one of the founders of the profession of sociology in the United States.76 He held a Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University and, at various times, served as Secretary of the American Economic Association as well as President of the American Sociological Association, and head of the American Civil Liberties Union. Among the places where his articles appeared were the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Ross was in the mainstream of Progressive intellectuals at the highest levels. He was a man of the left who had supported Eugene V. Debs in the 1894 Pullman strike and had advocated public ownership and regulation of public utilities. Active as a public intellectual in print and on the lecture circuit, Professor Ross referred to “us liberals” as people who speak up “for public interests against powerful selfish private interests,” and denounced those who disagreed with his views as unworthy “kept” spokesmen for special interests, a “mercenary corps” as contrasted with “us champions of the social welfare.”77
Roscoe Pound credited Ross with setting him “in the path the world is moving in.”78 Ross praised the muckrakers of his day and was also said to have been influential with Progressive Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.79 The introduction to one of Ross’ books included a letter of fulsome praise from TR.80 The voters’ repudiation of the Progressives in the years after the Woodrow Wilson presidency Ross referred to as the “Great Ice Age (1919–31).”81 In self-righteousness, as well as in ideology, he was a Progressive, a man of the left.
Francis A. Walker was similarly prominent in the economics profession of his day. He was the first president of the American Economic Association— and the Francis A. Walker medal, created in 1947, was the highest award given by the American Economic Association until 1977, when it was discontinued as a result of the creation of a Nobel Prize in economics. Professor Walker was also General Walker in the Union army during the Civil War. He was, at various times, also president of the American Statistical Association and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was also in charge of the ninth and tenth censuses of the United States, a Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
After Walker’s death in 1897, commemorative articles appeared in the scholarly journal of the American Statistical Association, in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the first scholarly journal of the economics profession in the United States, published at Harvard, as well as in the Journal of Political Economy, published at the University of Chicago, and an obituary also appeared in the Economic Journal, England’s premier scholarly journal of the economics profession.
Richard T. Ely received his Ph.D. summa cum laude from the University of Heidelberg and was the author of many books, one of which sold more than a million copies.82 Among the prominent people who were his students were the already mentioned Edward A. Ross and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom studied under him at Johns Hopkins University.83 He was also considered “a major contributing force in making the University of Wisconsin a vital institution wielding a profound influence upon the political economy of the State and the nation.”84 Ely has been called “the father of institutional economics,”85 the field in which one of his students, John R. Commons, made his name at the University of Wisconsin. Richard T. Ely’s death in 1943 was marked by tributes on both sides of the Atlantic, including an obituary in Britain’s Economic Journal.86 On into the twenty-first century, one of the honors awarded annually by the American Economic Association to a distinguished economist has been an invitation to give the association’s Richard T. Ely Lecture.
In short, Edward A. Ross, Francis A. Walker and Richard T. Ely were not only “in the mainstream”— to use a term that has become common in our times— they were among the elite of the mainstream. But that was no more indication of the validity of what they said then than it is among today’s elite of the mainstream.
While Madison Grant was not an academic scholar, he moved among prominent members of the intelligentsia. His closest friends included George Bird Grinnell, editor of the elite sportsman’s magazine Forest and Stream, and Henry Fairfield Osborn, a world-renowned paleontologist who coined the term “tyrannosaurus rex.” Osborn said, in the wake of mass mental testing: “We have learned once and for all that the negro is not like us.”87 In short, Madison Grant, Edward A. Ross, Francis A. Walker and Richard T. Ely were part of the intellectual currents of the times, in an era when leading intellectuals saw mental test results as confirming innate racial differences, when immigration was severely restricted for racial reasons, and when the Ku Klux Klan was revived and spread beyond the South, becoming an especially strong political force in the Midwest. As even a critical biographer of Madison Grant said:
Grant was not an evil man. He did not wake up in the morning and think to himself: “Hmm, I wonder what vile deeds I can commit today.” To the contrary, he was by all accounts a sweet, considerate, erudite, and infinitely charming figure.88
Madison Grant also moved in socially elite and politically Progressive circles. Theodore Roosevelt welcomed Grant’s entry into an exclusive social club that TR had founded.89 Later, Grant became friends for a time with Franklin D. Roosevelt, addressing him in letters as “My dear Frank,” while FDR reciprocated by addressing him as “My dear Madison.”90 The two men met while serving on a commission as civic-minded citizens, and the fact that both suffered crippling illnesses during the 1920s created a personal bond. But Madison Grant’s ideas moved far beyond such genteel circles in America. They were avidly seized upon in Nazi Germany, though Grant’s death in 1937 spared him from learning of the ultimate consequences of such ideas, which culminated in the Holocaust.
George Horace Lorimer, long-time editor of the Saturday Evening Post, was another major supporter of the Progressive movement in the early twentieth century and his magazine, with a readership of four to five million readers per week,91 carried weight politically and socially. He supported both Theodore Roosevelt and Progressive Senator Albert Beveridge.92 In proposing immigration restrictions, Lorimer— like many others of that era— invoked “science” as opposed to “the Pollyanna school.”93 In an editorial in the Saturday Evening Post, Lorimer warned against “our racial degeneration” as a result of immigration, which he said could end with Americans having to “forfeit our high estate and join the lowly ranks of the mongrel races.”94
In the early 1920s, Lorimer assigned novelist and future Pulitzer Prize winner Kenneth L. Roberts to write a series of articles on immigration for the Saturday Evening Post. In one of these articles Roberts referred to “the better-class Northern and Western Europeans” who “are particularly fine types of immigrants,” as contrasted with “the queer, alien, mongrelized people of Southeastern Europe.”95 These articles were later republished as a book titled Why Europe Leaves Home. In this book, Roberts said, among other things, “the Jews of Poland are human parasites,”96 that people from the Austro-Hungarian Empire were “inconceivably backward.”97 He added:
The American nation was founded and developed by the Nordic race, but if a few more million members of the Alpine, Mediterranean and Semitic races are poured among us, the result must inevitably be a hybrid race of people as worthless and futile as the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and Southeastern Europe.98
Like many others of that era, Roberts invoked the notion of a “scientific” approach to immigration law,99 while contrasting “the desirable immigrants from Northwestern Europe” with the “undesirables” who “came from Southern and Eastern European countries.”100
Progressive muckraking journalist George Creel, a former member o
f Woodrow Wilson’s administration, wrote articles on immigration in 1921 and 1922 in Collier’s magazine, another leading mass circulation publication of that era. In these articles he made the familiar contrast between the peoples of Northern and Western Europe with the people of Eastern and Southern Europe, using the familiar nomenclature of that time, which called the former Nordics and the latter Alpine and Mediterranean peoples:
The men and women who first came to America were Nordic— clean-blooded, strong-limbed people from England, Ireland, Scotland, Scandinavia, Belgium, Holland, Germany, and France. The millions that followed them, for a full two centuries, were also Nordic, holding the same customs, ideas, and ideals, fitting into the life they found as skin fits the hand.
Not until 1880 was there any vital change in the character of immigration, and then commenced the tidal waves of two new stocks— the Alpine from central Europe, Slavs for the most part, and the Mediterranean, the small swarthy peoples from southern Italy, Greece, Spain, and northern Africa.101
These latter immigrants, Creel described as the “failures, unfits, and misfits of the Old World.”102 Creel said, “those coming from eastern Europe were morally, physically, and mentally the worst in the history of immigration.”103
While H.L. Mencken was another prominent intellectual during the Progressive era, he was by no means a Progressive. Yet his view of blacks was very much like that of other intellectuals of the times. Writing in 1908, he wrote of “the hopelessly futile and fatuous effort to improve the negroes of the Southern United States by education.” He added:
It is apparent, on brief reflection, that the negro, no matter how much he is educated, must remain, as a race, in a condition of subservience; that he must remain the inferior of the stronger and more intelligent white man so long as he retains racial differentiation. Therefore, the effort to educate him has awakened in his mind ambitions and aspirations which, in the very nature of things, must go unrealized, and so, while gaining nothing whatever materially, he has lost all his old contentment, peace of mind and happiness. Indeed, it is a commonplace of observation in the United States that the educated and refined negro is invariably a hopeless, melancholy, embittered and despairing man.104
Similar views of blacks were expressed in other early writings by H.L. Mencken, though blacks were not the only group viewed negatively in those writings:
The negro loafer is not a victim of restricted opportunity and oppression. There are schools for him, and there is work for him, and he disdains both. That his forty-odd years of freedom have given him too little opportunity to show his mettle is a mere theory of the chair. As a matter of fact, the negro, in the mass, seems to be going backward. The most complimentary thing that can be said of an individual of the race today is that he is as industrious and honest a man as his grandfather, who was a slave. There are exceptional negroes of intelligence and ability, I am well aware, just as there are miraculous Russian Jews who do not live in filth; but the great bulk of the race is made up of inefficients.105
However, by 1926, H.L. Mencken had changed his position somewhat. In a review of a book of essays by leading black intellectuals, edited by Alain Locke, himself a leading black intellectual of the times, Mencken wrote:
This book, it seems to me, is a phenomenon of immense significance. What it represents is the American Negro’s final emancipation from his inferiority complex, his bold decision to go it alone. That inferiority complex, until very recently, conditioned all of his thinking, even (and perhaps especially) when he was bellowing most vociferously for his God-given rights.
…
As I have said, go read the book. And, having read it, ask yourself the simple question: could you imagine a posse of white Southerners doing anything so dignified, so dispassionate, so striking? … As one who knows the South better than most, and has had contact with most of its intellectuals, real and Confederate, I must say frankly that I can imagine no such thing. Here, indeed, the Negro challenges the white Southerner on a common ground, and beats him hands down.106
Yet Mencken was by no means sanguine about the prospects of the black population as a whole:
The vast majority of the people of their race are but two or three inches removed from gorillas: it will be a sheer impossibility, for a long, long while, to interest them in anything above pork-chops and bootleg gin.107
Like many other intellectuals of the early twentieth century, H.L. Mencken in 1937 favored eugenics measures— in this case, voluntary sterilization of males, encouraged by rewards to be supplied by private philanthropy. As in the past, he included white Southerners among those considered undesirable. He suggested that the answers to many social problems would be “to sterilize large numbers of American freemen, both white and black, to the end that they could no longer beget their kind.” For this “the readiest way to induce them to submit would be to indemnify them in cash.” The alternative, he said, would be “supporting an ever-increasing herd of morons for all eternity.”108
Not all eugenicists were racial determinists, as Mencken’s inclusion of white Southerners in his eugenics agenda in 1937 indicated. In England, H.G. Wells rejected the singling out of particular races for extinction, though he recommended that undesirable people of whatever race be targeted.109 Writing in 1916, Wells said:
Now I am a writer rather prejudiced against the idea of nationality; my habit of thought is cosmopolitan; I hate and despise a shrewish suspicion of foreigners and foreign ways ; a man who can look me in the face, laugh with me, speak truth and deal fairly, is my brother, though his skin is as black as ink or as yellow as an evening primrose.110
American novelist and radical Jack London, however, declared, “the Anglo-Saxon is a race of mastery” and is “best fitted for survival.” He said, “the inferior races must undergo destruction, or some humane form of economic slavery, is inevitable.”111 While Jack London was a man of the left during the Progressive era, he was not a Progressive. He boldly declared himself a socialist.
Woodrow Wilson, one of two American presidents who was also an intellectual in our sense of one who for years earned his living from the production of ideas (the other being Theodore Roosevelt), praised the movie The Birth of A Nation, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan, and had a private showing of it in the White House, to which prominent political figures were invited.112 It was during the Progressive administration of Woodrow Wilson that the Bureau of the Census and the Bureau of Printing and Engraving began to segregate black and white employees. The Post Office Department not only began to segregate its black and white employees in Washington during the Wilson administration, but also began to fire and downgrade black postal employees in the South, as did the Department of the Treasury. President Wilson expressed his approval of these actions.113
The academic world was by no means exempt from the racial and social beliefs of the times. In early twentieth century America, during an era when most applicants to even highly prestigious colleges were admitted, there were both formal and informal restrictions on the admissions of Jews, Harvard being one of the few institutions to openly admit imposing quota limits, though a 1909 article characterized anti-Semitism as “more dominant at Princeton” (under Woodrow Wilson) than at any of the other institutions surveyed. In 1910, students at Williams College demonstrated against the admission of Jews. In 1922, Yale’s dean of admission said: “The opinion is general in the Faculty that the proportion of those in college whose racial elements are such as not to permit of assimilation has been exceeded and that the most noticeable representatives among those regarded as undesirable are the Jewish boys.”114
Such views on race or ethnicity were not inevitably entailed by the principles of Progressivism, though they were not precluded by those principles either. During the Progressive era itself, Theodore Roosevelt had a very different view of the potential of blacks than did many other Progressives. In response to a British historian who expressed a fear that the black and yellow races would rise in the world to th
e point of challenging the white race, Theodore Roosevelt said: “By that time the descendant of the negro may be as intellectual as the Athenian.”115 Moreover, he also believed in equal opportunity for other minorities.116
Nevertheless, Roosevelt’s low estimate of the contemporary level of knowledge and understanding among black Americans117 might place him under at least a suspicion of racism by those today who project contemporary standards back into the past, or who perhaps think of the black population of the past as if they were simply today’s black population living in an earlier time, rather than a population which in that era included millions of people who had not yet acquired even the ability to read and write.
One of the ironies of Madison Grant’s theories was that he was a descendant of Scots who emigrated after the failed uprisings against the English in 1745. In earlier centuries, Scotland had been one of the most backward nations on the fringes of European civilization, even though Grant classified the Scots as Nordics, who were supposedly superior intellectually. Later, Scots had a spectacular rise to the forefront of European and world civilization, in too brief a time— as history is measured— for there to have been any major change in the genetic make-up of Scotland’s population. In short, the history of his own ancestral homeland provided some of the strongest evidence against Grant’s theories of genetic determinism. So do other major reversals in technological and other leadership among nations, races and civilizations, such as the reversal of the positions of China and Europe already noted. There are many peoples and nations that have experienced their “golden age,” only to later fall behind, or even be conquered by, their erstwhile inferiors.