ARTICULATIONS
OF SUPERIORITY IN THE 19TH CENTURY
Academic anthropology achieved a recognizable
form during the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century was also the
great age of Western European imperialism, and of racism, and its final
decades were the first great era of monopoly capitalism. All of these developments
were interconnected. What I've tried to do in the readings in this section
of the course is simply to give you access to some of the rhetorics of
superiority which helped legitimate these movements, especially in the
period 1850-1900. I certainly don't mean for you to memorize this stuff,
just to read through it and absorb it. Many of you may have little experience
of up-front politically incorrect comment. The supply is of course vast,
so here (and in the associated readings) you'll get a very partial and
arbitrary selection from it. Three comments, especially, are in order.
First, there were also counter arguments being made throughout, from a
variety of positions. I've ignored them. Second, a la TV, perhaps I should
warn that much of this material is offensive (especially to those of delicate
and cultivated sensibility, as the Victorians would have put it). Third,
I hope you'll see in all this that whether the Victorians were talking
about primitives, or women, or the Irish, or the poor, etc., they were
effectively singing the same refrain: if you're not a cultured white Anglo-Saxon
male, you're morally inferior, and biologically inferior. A rationalization
is a rationalization is a....
I. SAVAGES
Weldon Library has a copy of a
titillating exploitation book from 1863 by one James Greenwood called
Curiosities
of Savage Life (London: S.O. Beeton).These
excerpts from his brief "Introduction" should give a sense of the treasures
it holds.
The young English gentleman of modern times, whose
mind, by culture and example, has become properly balanced, whose talents
are wrought to their finest, whose sense of honour is extreme, and whose
pride of ancestry is beyond speech -whose organs of sight and sound and
taste are educated to exquisite fineness- whose claims, in short, to be
considered a perfectly civilized being are indisputable- could scarcely,
if he tried, succeed in realizing, for his contemplation and instruction,
a perfect Savage: a wild uncultivated barbarian, whose mind would be a
desert but for rank unwholesome weeds which are indigenous to the soil,
and which are watered by his superstitious tears, and kept green by precious
memories of those renowned men his father and grandfather, a being whose
sympathies are bounded by the skin that covers him; whose carcase is often
an evil to the eye and ever unpleasant to the nose; who has, for manly
trust and hope, the sorry substitute of suspicion and quaking fear; and
whose mistrust of life is only exceeded by his mistrust of death, which
he dreads like fire.
As already observed, he -the modern young English
gentleman- could not realize such a picture if he tried; but, unless I
am much mistaken, he does not try. Without risking an expression
of his opinion on the subject, he has settled to his private satisfaction
that the forest-haunting, clothes-eschewing, arrow-poisoning, man-devouring,
bona
fide Savage, is a thing of the past. He may not have returned to the
Great Spirit for good and all more than a century ago -possibly not more
than fifty years- certainly, however, before the invention of the telegraph
and the penny daily newspapers, and the sixpenny post to New Zealand and
the Guinea coast....
Curious as it may seem, dear young English gentleman,
it is true. Savage life is still vigorous. When you rose from your snowy
bed this morning, tens, nay, hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children,
more or less in the condition of the savage above described, rose from
couches of grass, and rushes and reeds, and bamboo withes, and from nest-like
hammocks slung among the upper branches of lofty trees, and from rat-like
burrows in the earth; the last-mentioned dirty practice finding favour
among the Bushmen of Southern Africa, and the last-mentioned but one among
the Guaraons, a most singular people inhabiting the shores of the South
American river Orinoco, and of whom many curious matters will be by and
by related. While we this very morning were profiting by the wholesome
bath and its appurtenances, the brush and towel, whole nations were oiling
and daubing their swart skins, and painting their ugly faces green, or
scarlet or light blue, or -as was the case with some of the American Indians
and the Friendly Islanders- all these colours at once and a few others,
according to the prevailing fashion. While we exercised the sanitary tooth-brush,
savage molars and incisors were being dyed jet black, the file in a few
instances being brought into operation that the said masticators might
preserve their needle-like sharpness; a few ivory or fish-bone spikes stuck
through the ears, and through the nose, and among the appalling shocks
of wool, with a few iron or copper rings attached to the wrists and ancles,
and a something for decency sake slouched about the loins, completing the
toilet.
While we sat down at our well-ordered breakfast
tables, legions of our savage brethren were devouring the flesh of the
elephant, and the shark, and the ponderous manatee, and the nimble monkey,
together with insects that fly and insects that creep, and grubs that live
at the roots of the weeds. Nay, the dark truth must be spoken, in certain
of the earth's gloomy places man flesh was this morning bought and
cooked and eaten; and, inasmuch as it is considered by these monsters proper
and toothsome diet will probably be cooked and eaten many a morning yet
to come. True, the repulsive custom is now eradicated, or nearly, from
among many whilom thorough-going cannibals, as with the Figians and the
New Zealanders, but in certain parts of Africa it is common enough. The
Fan tribe of Equatorial Africans may be mentioned as an example. The last
European traveller who traversed their country, on approaching a Fan town,
met an old lady with well filed teeth returning from "market" and carrying
a joint of "man" with as little concern as a butcher's boy would carry
a shoulder of mutton. However, I will say no more about cannibalism at
present. Goodness knows, there will be more than enough to say about the
abominable business before this volume is many chapters old.
But alas! there is little to be gained by putting
off the evil day. Were savage life like civilized, did it have its sunny
as well as its gloomy side, one might hover about the pleasant bits, and
at a merry grindstone whet one's pen for terrible encounters to follow;
but in the life of a savage, from his birth to his burial, there is nothing
to regard with real gladness: plenty that is odd and grotesque and provocative
of laughter, but nothing abidingly funny, or that does not crumble to ashes
beneath the weight of reflection.
The plan I propose to adopt in this volume is to
take Savage life from its beginning to its ending; to peep into the savage
baby's cradle in whatever part of the world it is to be found, to take
an interest in his boyhood, and to mark his behaviour at that interesting
period; to look over his shoulder while he is at his lessons; to watch
him at his games, and make inventory of his toys. As he grows to be "a
proper tall young man," it is my intention to accompany him on his sweethearting
excursions, to listen to his love songs and to the soft things he whispers
into La Belle Sauvage's be-ringed or be-skewered ear. In whatever way the
question is popped, the reader may depend on being informed of it....
II. CELTS
Those unfamiliar with the history may be surprised to
discover that the English for a long time (til today?) described and depicted
the Irish in much the same ways in which they described and depicted Black
Africans and West Indians: as strong, stupid, ruled by passions, and resembling
chimpanzees. Some of you may know of Charles Kingsley as a children's book
author (The Water Babies, eg), but he also professed history at
Cambridge and, in 1860, wrote to his wife from Ireland: "I am haunted
by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country...to
see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not see
it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white
as ours." Check out the many illustrations in Nothing
but the Same Old Story: The Roots of Anti-Irish Racism
(1984; London: Information on Ireland) if you think this is unique.
The text is by Liz Curtis, but her name doesn't appear on the cover.
These excerpts are from pages 53-6 & 58.
The notion that the Irish were inferior to [the British]
provided [them] with a convenient excuse for applying different standards
of justice in Ireland than they would at home. Since the Act of Union in
1800, the two countries had become one political unit, the United Kingdom.
But while Ireland was subject to coercive laws and a repressive administration,
Britain was not. The British justified the discrepancy by arguing that
the Irish were uncivilised and un-English. The Times pronounced in 1846:
The great
obstacle to tranquillity in Ireland is the national character - the character
of the masses,
of the middle classes, of the senators
of Ireland... When Ireland acts according to the principles of
civilised man, then she can be ruled
by the laws of civilised man.
That Britain's subjugation and exploitation of Ireland was far more
'uncivilised' than anything the Irish had done was of course not considered.
Some months later the Times expanded on the theme:
To Englishmen
a vigour beyond the Consititution is an odious thing. The powers granted
by the
Constitution they have always found
adequate to meet emergency and danger. And it seems unkind and
unjust to recommend for Irishmen a
policy that would be [rejected] for ourselves. But we must be ruled
by circumstances. If crimes are un-English
- if English means for detecting and punishing them fail, why
should not an un-English power be
exercised in districts where violence and murder stalk unavenged
and unchecked?'
Such attitudes remain all too evident in Britain's handling of the
situation in the North of Ireland today.
By the mid-nineteenth century, Britain controlled
large parts of the world directly - Ireland. the British West Indies, Canada,
Australia, South Africa, India - and exercised indirect control over even
vaster areas. Then one country after another was annexed, till by the end
of the century the British empire was estimated to comprise a quarter of
the world's land area and a fifth of its population.
The empire was acquired through violence, bribery
and the 'divide-and-rule' strategy, but the Victorians attributed their
success to 'Anglo-Saxon superiority'. This old idea was now increasingly
seen in terms of new pseudo-scientific theories of race.
Discredited by later generations of scientists,
nineteenth century theorists divided humanity into 'races' on the basis
of external physical features. These 'races' were said to have inherited
differences not only of physique, but also of character. These 'differences'
allowed the 'races' to be placed in a hierarchy: needless to say the Teutons,
who included the Anglo-Saxons, were placed at the top, black people -especially
'Hottentots' - at the bottom, and Celts and Jews somewhere in between.
Anthropologists went around measuring people's skulls,
and assigning them to different 'races' on the basis of factors such as
how far their jaws protruded. Celts and others were said to have more 'primitive'
features than Anglo-Saxons. The physician John Beddoe invented the
'index of nigrescence', a formula to identify the racial components of
a given people. He concluded that the Irish were darker than the people
of eastern and central England, and were closer to the aborigines of the
British Isles, who in turn had traces of 'negro' ancestry in their appearances.
The British upper classes also regarded their own working class as almost
a race apart, and claimed that they had darker skin and hair than themselves.
The Anglo-Saxon character that came in a package
with the refined features was said to be industrious, thoughtful, clean,
law-abiding and emotionally restrained, while the characters of the various
colonised peoples were said to be the very opposite. The anatomist Robert
Knox,
in a book published in 1850, described the Celtic character as: 'Furious
fanaticism; a love of war and disorder; a hatred for order and patient
industry; no accumulative habits; restless, treacherous and uncertain:
look at Ireland...' He drew the inevitable political conclusion: 'As a
Saxon, I abhor all dynasties, monarchies and bayonet governments, but this
latter seems to be the only one suitable for the Celtic man.' ...
Like Carlyle, Froude was interested
in the West Indies, and looked back longingly to the days of slavery. He
considered the 'negroes', like the Irish, to be an inferior race, and wrote:
Nature has
made us unequal, and Acts of Parliament cannot make us equal. Some must
lead and some
must follow, and the question is only
of degree and kind... Slavery is gone... but it will be an ill day for
mankind if no one is to be compelled
any more to obey those who are wiser than himself...
Some writers pursued the notion of a biologically
defined hierarchy of human races to its limit: the 'final solution'. Charles
Dilke,
who divided humanity into the 'dearer races', such as the Anglo-Saxons,
and the 'cheaper races', such as the Irish and the Chinese, viewed the
disappearance of the American Indians with equanimity: 'The gradual extinction
of the interior races is not only a law of nature but a blessing to mankind.'
An editorial in the Times in 1865 noted contentedly that 'Celts' were leaving
Ireland and being replaced by 'Saxons': the rich and fertile country was
'being cleared quietly for the interests and luxury of humanity... A Catholic
Celt will soon be as rare on the banks of the Shannon as a Red Indian on
the shores of the Manhattan.'
The historian Edward Freeman, who, as his
obituary in the Manchester Guardian put it, 'gloried in the Germanic origin
of the English nation', wrote during a visit to America in 1881:
This would be a grand land if only
every Irishman would kill a negro, and be hanged for it. I find this
sentiment generally approved -sometimes
with the qualification that they want Irish and negroes for
servants, not being able to get any
other.
III. BLACKS
In part because the nineteenth
century racism of Britain was perfected in the debates over colonial slavery
which raged from the 1780s on, it's not entirely surprising to find that
Africans and African Americans were especially widely demeaned. Below,
I give three excerpts. The first comment is from Paul B. Rich's
1986 Race and Empire in British Politics
(Cambridge UP), pp. 18-9, and makes the obvious connection between Imperialist
expansion and racism.
...Anthropometry in Britain was fostered at a time when it was
seen internationally as legitimating claims of national identity, such
as in Germany after the victory against France in the Franco-Prussian War
of 1870 and in Italy after its unification under Cavour. The measurement
of human types reinforced visible phenotypical differences that could be
made patent through photographic illustrations, and by the late 1890s a
spate of popular works began to appear, with lavish detail, to illustrate
the nature and diversity of human races and the implicit superiority of
the white Anglo-Saxon races and civilisation. The Living Races of Mankind,
jointly
edited by H. N. Hutchinson, J. W. Gregory and R. Hydeken, for example,
appeared in 1900 in 18 fortnightly parts with some 600 illustrations described
as being 'from life'. The necessity for understanding such racial diversity
arose, the authors argued, from the growing commercial challenges to British
imperial influence:
We have begun
to realise that the most promising fields of enterprise for our ever-increasing
community,
the most profitable markets for our wares, may some day be found in places
which are
now the darkest
corners of the earth, and that the half-clothed savage, just emerging from
the brute
condition,
is a human being capable of being educated, in the near future, into a
customer for British
trade and
a contributor to the world's wealth.
As anthropometric investigation became linked to
empire, it tended to buttress an existing commonsense racism which reinforced
'the English gentleman's sense of his racial superiority' and of his being
part of 'an enlightened intelligentsia in a largely barbarian England'.
The imperial theme stressed especially the cultural backwardness of the
black race compared to their strong physical ability. The 'muscular development'
of black races, the authors of The Living Races of Mankind pointed
out, was 'good' and when it came to the question of work which 'depends
only on muscle they excell the average European; but in anything requiring
judgment they are easily beaten. The nervous system is not very sensitive,
and the appreciation of pain is dull. Operations can be conducted without
anaesthetic.' This racial image reinforced the well-entrenched Carlylean
stereotype of the markedly dull, but physically fit black man who needed
to be coerced into work....
Thomas Carlyle keeps getting mentioned, and for
good reason. He was one of the leading historians and essayists of his
day, a combative and controversial man who published his famous "Occasional
Discourse on the Nigger Question" in Fraser's
Magazine (a leading monthly) in December 1849.
Four years later, it was republished separately as a pamphlet. (Today,
it can be found, eg, in Philip D. Curtin's
Imperialism.)
This bombastic and offensive piece of work contained his comments on the
current colonial policy of Britain in the West Indies. Just a decade before,
in 1838, slavery had been abolished in the Empire (including Canada) and,
especially on the larger islands, the sugar industry went into decline.
Shockingly, the ex-slaves preferred to do something other than work in
the cane, even for wages, if they could avoid it. The Imperial response
to the "labour shortage" (really, a demand for decent wages) was to propose
the importation of indentured servants from Africa, India, and China, in
order to swell the labour pool and keep wages down.
West-Indian affairs, as we all know, and as some
of us know to our cost, are in a rather troublous condition this good while.
In regard to West-Indian affairs, however, Lord John Russell is able to
comfort us with one fact, indisputable where so many are dubious, That
the Negroes are all very happy and doing well. A fact very comfortable
indeed. West-Indian Whites, it is admitted, are far enough from happy;
West-Indian Colonies not unlike sinking wholly into ruin: at home too,
the British Whites are rather badly off; several millions of them hanging
on the verge of continual famine; and in single towns, many thousands of
them very sore put to it, at this time, not to live "well" or as a man
should, in any sense temporal or spiritual, but to live at all: -these,
again, are uncomfortable facts; and they are extremely extensive and important
ones. But, thank Heaven, our interesting Black population, -equalling almost
in number of heads one of the Ridings of Yorkshire, and in worth (in
quantity of intellect, faculty, docility, energy, and available human valour
and value) perhaps one of the streets of Seven Dials, -are all doing remarkably
well. "Sweet blighted lilies,"-as the American epitaph on the Nigger child
has it, -sweet blighted lilies, they are holding-up their heads again!
How pleasant, in the universal bankruptcy abroad, and dim dreary stagnancy
at home, as if for England too there remained nothing but to suppress Chartist
riots, banish united Irishmen, vote the supplies, and wait with
arms crossed till black Anarchy and Social Death devoured us also, as it
has done the others; how pleasant to have always this fact to fall-back
upon: Our beautiful Black darlings are at last happy; with little labour
except to the teeth, which surely, in those excellent horse-jaws
of theirs, will not fail!
... far over the sea, we have a few black persons
rendered extremely "free" indeed. Sitting yonder with their beautiful muzzles
up to the ears in pumpkins, imbibing sweet pulps and juices; the grinder
and incisor teeth ready for ever new work, and the pumpkins cheap as grass
in those rich climates: while the sugar-crops rot round them uncut, because
labour cannot be hired, so cheap are the pumpkins; -and at home we are
but required to rasp from the breakfast-loaves of our own English labourers
some slight "differential sugar-duties," and lend a poor half-million or
a few poor millions now and then, to keep that beautiful state of matters
going on. A state of matters lovely to contemplate, in these emancipated
epochs of the human mind....
The West Indies, it appears, are short of labour;
as indeed is very conceivable in those circumstances. Where a Black man,
by working about half-an-hour a-day (such is the calculation), can supply
himself, by aid of sun and soil, with as much pumpkin as will suffice,
he is likely to be a little stiff to raise into hard work! Supply and demand,
which, science says, should be brought to bear on him, have an uphill task
of it with such a man. Strong sun supplies itself gratis, rich soil in
those unpeopled or half-peopled regions almost gratis; these are his
"supply";
and half-an-hour a-day, directed upon these, will produce pumpkin, which
is his "demand." The fortunate Black man, very swiftly does he settle his
account
with supply and demand: -not so swiftly the less fortunate White man of
those tropical localities. A bad case, his, just now. He himself cannot
work; and his black neighbour, rich in pumpkin, is in no haste to help
him. Sunk to the ears in pumpkin, imbibing saccharine juices, and much
at his ease in the Creation, he can listen to the less fortunate white
man's "demand," and take his own time in supplying it. Higher wages, massa;
higher, for your cane-crop cannot wait; still higher, -till no conceivable
opulence of cane-crop will cover such wages. In Demerara, as I read in
the Blue book of last year, the cane-crop, far and wide, stands rotting....
...[he foresees that the importation
of new populations from elsewhere in the Empire will eventually lead to
over-population in the islands, so that "pumpkins" will become as scarce
in the West Indies as potatoes in Ireland] To have "emancipated"
the West Indies into a Black Ireland; "free" indeed, but an Ireland,
and Black! The world may yet see prodigies; and reality be stranger than
a nightmare dream....
...And first, with regard to the West Indies, it
may be laid-down as a principle... That no Black man who will not work
according to what ability the gods have given him for working, has the
smallest right to eat pumpkin, or to any fraction of land that will grow
pumpkin, however plentiful such land may be; but has an indisputable and
perpetual right to be compelled, by the real proprietors of said
land, to do competent work for his living. This is the everlasting duty
of all men, black or white, who are born in this world.... If it be his
own indolence that prevents and prohibits him [from work], then his own
indolence is the enemy he must be delivered from: and the first "right"
he has, -poor indolent blockhead, black or white,- is, That... whatsoever
wiser, more industrious person may be passing that way, shall endeavour
to "emancipate" him from his indolence, and by some wise means, as I said,
compel him, since inducing will not serve, to do the work he is fit for.
Induce him, if you can: yes, sure enough, by all means try what inducement
will do; and indeed every coachman and carman knows that secret, without
our preaching, and applies it to his very horses as the true method: -but
if your Nigger will not be induced? In that case he must be compelled;
should and must; and the tacit prayer he makes (unconsciously he, poor
blockhead), to you, and to me, and to all the world who are wiser than
himself, is, "Compel me!" [this goes on for page after page after page]
The prolific and famous novelist Anthony Trollope,
many of whose novels are still read today, also published non-fiction,
including a popular travel book called The West
Indies and the Spanish Main (1860), from
which these passages are taken (pp. 58-9, 64-5, & 77 of the New York
edition). He was an acute and acerbic observer, and a thorough-going racist
who parroted the biologized cliches of the "cultivated". In the same era,
the prominent Oxford historian James Anthony Froude published his account
of West Indian travels. It's the same old story. This is from Trollope.
...The West Indian negro... has made no approach
to the civilization of his white fellow creatures, whom he imitates as
a monkey does a man.
Physically he is capable of the hardest bodily work,
and that probably with less bodily pain than men of any other race but
he is idle, unambitious as to worldly position, sensual, and content with
little. Intellectually, he is apparently capable of but little sustained
effort; but, singularly enough, here he is ambitious. He burns to be regarded
as a scholar, puzzles himself with fine words, addicts himself to religion
for the sake of appearance, and delights in aping the little graces of
civilization. He despises himself thoroughly, and would probably be content
to starve for a month if he could appear as a white man for a day; but
yet he delights in signs of respect paid to him, black man as he is, and
is always thinking of his own dignity. If you want to win his heart for
an hour, call him a gentleman; but if you want to reduce him to a despairing
obedience, tell him that he is a filthy nigger, assure him that his father
and mother had tails like monkeys, and forbid him to think that he can
have a soul like a white man. Among the West Indies one may frequently
see either course adopted towards them by their unreasoning ascendant masters.
I do not think that education has as yet done much
for the black man in the Western world. He can always observe, and often
read; but he can seldom reason. I do not mean to assert that he is absolutely
without mental power, as the calf is. He does draw conclusions, but carries
them only a short way. I think that he seldom understands the purpose of
industry, the object of truth, or the results of honesty. He is not always
idle, perhaps not always false, and certainly not always a thief; but his
motives are the fear of immediate punishment, or hopes of immediate reward.
He fears that and hopes that only. Certain virtues he copies, because they
are the virtues of a white man. The white man is the god present to his
eye, and he believes in him -believes in him with a qualified faith, and
imitates him with a qualified constancy.
And thus I am led to say, and I say it with sorrow
enough, that I distrust the negro's religion. What I can say is this: that
in my opinion they rarely take in and digest the great and simple doctrines
of Christianity, that they should love and fear the Lord their God, and
love their neighbors as themselves.
Those who differ from me -and the number will comprise
the whole clergy of these western realms, and very many beside the clergy-
will ask, among other questions, whether simple doctrines are obeyed in
England much better than they are in Jamiaca. I would reply that I am not
speaking of obedience. The opinion which I venture to give is, that the
very first meaning of the terms does not often reach the negro's mind,
not even the minds of those among them who are enthusiastically religious....
...It is hard for man to work without hope of seeing
that for which he labors.
But to return to our sable friends. The first desire
of a man in a state of civilization is for property. Greed and covetousness
are no doubt vices; but they are the vices which have grown from cognate
virtues. Without a desire for property, man could make no progress. But
the negro has no such desire; no desire strong enough to induce him to
labor for that which he wants. In order that he may eat to-day and be clothed
to-morrow, he will work a little; as for anything beyond that, he is content
to lie in the sun.
Emancipation and the last change in the sugar duties
have made land only too plentiful in Jamaica, and enormous tracts have
been thrown out of cultivation as unprofitable. And it is also only too
fertile. The negro, consequently, has had unbounded facility of squatting,
and has availed himself of it freely. To recede from civilization and become
again savage -as savage as the laws of the comrnunity can permit- has been
to his taste. I believe that he would altogether retrograde if left to
himself.
I shall now be asked, having said so much, whether
I think that emancipation was wrong. By no means. I think that emancipation
was clearly right; but I think we expected far too great and far too quick
a result from emancipation.
These people are a servile race, fitted by nature
for hardest physical work, and apparently at present fitted for little
else. Some thirty years since they were in a state when such work was their
lot; but their tasks were exacted from them in a condition of bondage abhorrent
to the feelings of the age, and opposed to the religion which we practised.
For us, thinking as we did, slavery was a sin. From that sin we have cleansed
ourselves....
No Englishman, no Anglo-Saxon, could be what he
now is but for that portion of wild and savage energy which has come to
him from his Vandal forefathers. May it not then be fair to suppose that
a time shall come when a race will inhabit those lovely islands, fitted
by nature for their burning sun, in whose blood shall be mixed some portion
of northern energy, and which shall owe its physical powers to African
progenitors, -a race that shall be no more ashamed of the name of negro
than we are of the name Saxon?
But, in the meantime, what are we to do with our
friend, lying as he now is at his ease under the cotton-tree, and declining
to work after ten o'clock in the morning?...
...It is almost unnecessary to explain that by colored
men I mean those who are of a mixed race -of a breed mixed, be it in what
proportion it may, between the white European and the black African....
My theory -for I acknowledge to a theory- is this:
that Providence has sent white men and black men to these regions in order
that from them may spring a race fitted by intellect for civilization;
and fitted also by physical organization for tropical labor. The negro
in his primitive state is not, I think, fitted for the former; and the
European white Creole is certainly not fitted for the latter....
It is probable also that the future race who shall
inhabit these islands may have other elements than the two already named.
There will soon be here -in the teeth of our friends of the Anti-Slavery
Society- thousands from China and Hindostan. The Chinese and the Coolies
-immigrants from India are always called Coolies- greatly excel the negro
in intelligence, and partake, though in a limited degree, of the negro's
physical abilities in a hot climate. And thus the blood of Asia will be
mixed with that of Africa; and the necessary compound will, by God's infinite
wisdom and power, be formed for these latitudes, as it has been formed
for the colder regions in which the Anglo-Saxon preserves his energy, and
works.
IV. AMERICAN IMPERIALISM AND "SOCIAL
DARWINISM"
In the closing years of the nineteenth
century, the US went imperialist with such flourishes as the Spanish-American
War of 1898 (for which they got Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Phillipines, and,
sort of, Cuba); the Panama Canal (for which they had to grab "Panama" from
Columbia); and the domination of "banana republics" in Central America.
All this after "Manifest Destiny's" destruction of the Native peoples of
the West. The ideology often presented to justify such adventures (as well
as the activities of the robber barons in oil, railroads, etc) used the
vocabulary of Darwinian "struggle for survival" to justify the domination
of one class, nation, gender, or individual over others. Though the most
prominent writer associated with "social Darwinism" was the Englishman
Herbert Spencer, the US was the place where its rhetoric lasted longest
and was most public. Unless otherwise specified, the selections below are
from a standard source on the subject, Richard Hofstadter's Social
Darwinism in America (1944). As you'll
see, the US also clasped "Anglo-Saxonism" to its breast. Don't blame
Darwin for all this, but remember that his depiction of Nature as a realm
of free competition was in the first place a re-articulation of Liberal
views on "the economy." Once Darwinian biology had become accepted, its
rhetoric of competitive Nature could be re-appropriated in social debates,
along with its aura of "science," the natural, and the inevitable. Many
of these views are very much alive and well today, though the language
has changed.
Entrepreneurs after the Civil War
(Hofstadter)
With its rapid expansion, its exploitative
methods, its desperate competition, and its peremptory rejection of failure,
post-[Civil War] America was like a vast human caricature of the Darwinian
struggle for existence and survival of the fittest. Successful business
entrepreneurs apparently accepted almost by instinct the Darwinian terminology
which seemed to portray the conditions of their existence....
...James J. Hill, another railroad
magnate, in an essay defending business consolidation, argued that “the
fortunes of railroad companies are determined by the law of the survival
of the fittest,” and implied that the absorption of smaller by larger roads
represents the industrial analogy to the victory of the strong. And John
D. Rockefeller, speaking from an intimate acquaintance with the
methods of competition, declared in a Sunday-school address:
The
growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest. The American
Beauty rose can be
produced
in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by
sacrificing the early
buds
which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is
merely the working-out of
a law
of nature and a law of God.
The most prominent of the disciples of Spencer was
Andrew Carnegie, who sought out the philosopher, became his intimate
friend, and showered him with favors. In his autobiography, Carnegie told
how troubled and perplexed he had been over the collapse of Christian theology,
until he took the trouble to read Darwin and Spencer.
I remember
that light came as in a flood and all was clear. Not only had I got rid
of theology and the
supernatural,
but I had found the truth of evolution. “All is well since all grows better,”
became my
motto, my
true source of comfort. Man was not created with an instinct for his own
degradation, but
from the lower
he had risen to the higher forms. Nor is there any conceivable end to his
march to
perfection.
His face is turned to the light; he stands in the sun and looks upward.
Perhaps it was comforting, too, to discover that social laws were founded
in the immutable principles of the natural order. In an article in the
North
American Review, which he ranked among the best of his writings, Carnegie
emphasized the biological foundations of the law of competition. However
much we may object to the seeming harshness of this law, he wrote, “It
is here; we cannot evade it; no substitutes for it have been found; and
while the law may sometimes be hard for the individual, it is best for
the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department.”....
The reception accorded to Spencer’s social ideas
cannot be dissociated from that accorded to the main body of his thought;
however some part of his success probably came because he was telling the
guardians of American society what they wanted to hear.
Competition versus Socialism Yale
professor William Graham Sumner, 1879, comments by Hofstadter.
...Sumner
was perhaps inspired to minimize the human conflicts in the struggle for
existence by a desire to dull the resentment of the poor toward the rich.
He did not at all times, however, shrink from a direct analogy between
animal struggle and human competition. In the Spencerian intellectual atmosphere
of the 1870's and 1880's it was natural for conservatives to see the economic
contest in competitive society as a reflection of the struggle in the animal
world. It was easy to argue by analogy from natural selection of fitter
organisms to social selection of fitter men, from organic forms with superior
adaptability to citizens with a greater store of economic virtue. The competitive
order was now supplied with academic rationale. Competition was glorious.
Just as survival was the result of strength, success was the reward of
virtue. Sumner had no patience with those who would lavish compensations
upon the virtueless. Many economists, he declared (in a lecture given in
1879 on the effect of hard times on economic thinking),
...seem to be terrified
that distress and misery still remain on earth and promise to remain as
long as the
vices of human nature remain. Many
of then are frightened at liberty, especially under the form of
competition, which they elevate into
a bugbear. They think it bears harshly on the weak. They do not
perceive that here “the strong” and
“the weak” are terms which admit of no definition unless they
are made equivalent to the industrious
and the idle, the frugal and the extravagant. They do not perceive,
furthermore, that if we do not like
the survival of the fittest, we have only one possible alternative, and
that is the survival of the unfittest.
The former is the law of civilization; the latter is the law of
anti-civilization. We have our choice
between the two, or we can go on, as in the past, vacillating
between the two, but a third plan
-the socialist desideratum- a plan for nourishing the unfittest and yet
advancing in civilization, no man
will ever find.
The progress of civilization, according to Sumner,
depends upon the selection process and that in turn depends upon the workings
of unrestricted competition. Competition is a law of nature which “can
no more be done away with than gravitation,” and which men can ignore only
to their sorrow.
Anglo-Saxon expansion
Rev.Josiah Strong's 1885 best-seller Our
Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis.
(The Anglo-saxon Race) is multiplying
more rapidly than any other European race. It already owns one-third of
the earth, and will get more as it grows. By 1980 the world Anglo-Saxon
race should number at least 713,000,000. Since North America is much bigger
than the little English isle, it will be the seat of Anglo-Saxondom.
If human progress follows a law of development,
if “Time's noblest offspring is the last,” our civilization should be the
noblest; for we are “The heirs of all the ages in the foremost files of
time,” and not only do we occupy the latitude of power, but our land is
the last to be occupied in that latitude. There is no other virgin soil
in the North Temperate Zone. If the consummation of human progress is not
to be looked for here, if there is yet to flower a higher civilization,
where is the soil that is to produce it?
Then will the world enter upon a new stage of its
history -- the final competition of races for which the Anglo-Saxon
is being schooled. If I do not read amiss, this powerful race will
move down upon Mexico, down upon Central and South America, out upon the
islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond. And can anyone doubt
that the result of this competition of races will be the “survival of the
fittest?”
Teutons
Senator
Beveridge
speaking in the US Senate, 1899.
God has not been preparing the English-speaking
and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle
self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world
to establish system where chaos reigns ... He has made us adepts in government
that we may administer government among savages and senile peoples.
Imperial Vigor
Theodore Roosevelt (soon to be US President)
Speech. Intro from Hofstadter.
...In the most memorable of his imperialist exhortations, “The Strenuous
Life” (1899), Theodore Roosevelt warned of the possibility of national
elimination in the international struggle for existence:
We cannot
avoid the responsibilities that confront us in Hawaii, Cuba, Porto Rico,
and the Philippines.
All we can decide is whether we shall
meet them in a way that will redound to the national
credit, or whether
we shall make of our dealings with
these new problems a dark and shameful page in our
history ... The timid
man, the lazy man, the man who distrusts
his country, the over-civilized man, who has lost the great fighting,
masterful virtues,
the ignorant man, and the man of dull mind, whose soul is incapable of
feeling the mighty
lift that thrills “stern men with
empires in their brains” -- all these, of course, shrink from
seeing the nation
undertake its new duties...
I preach to you, then, my countrymen. that our country calls not for for
the life of ease but for the life
of strenuous endeavor. The twentieth
century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand
idly by, if we seek merely swollen,
slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from
the hard contests where
men must win at hazard of their lives
and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder
and stronger peoples
will pass us by, and will win
for themselves the domination of the world.
Commercial self-preservation
Charles A. Conant, a prominent journalist
and economist troubled about the necessity of finding an outlet for surplus
capital, “if the entire fabric of the present economic order is not to
be shaken by a social revolution,” argued that
... the law of self-preservation,
as well as that of the survival of the fittest, is urging our
people on in a path which is
undoubtedly a departure from the policy of the past, but which
is inevitably marked out by
the new conditions and requirements of the present.
Conant warned against the possibility of decadence if the country did
not seize upon its opportunities at once. Another writer denied that a
policy of colonial expansion was anything novel in American history. We
had colonized the West. The question was not whether we should now enter
upon a colonial career but whether we should shift our colonizing heritage
into new channels. “We must not forget that the Anglo-Saxon race is expansive.”
Simple Racism From
Stanley
Coben 1991 Rebellion against Victorianism:
The Impetus for Cultural Change in 1920's America
(Oxford UP), pp. 39-40.
...Aided and encouraged by scientific evidence such
as that supplied by Agassiz, the Social Darwinists, and the eugenicists,
American social scientists produced a vast literature justifying the racial
and ethnic--and therefore much of the social and economic--status quo.
Historians’ research led those who studied the topic in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries to conclude that slavery had been a rather
benevolent institution which contributed to the civilizing of the unfortunate
black race. Attempts to give blacks a semblence of equality after the Civil
War had been ill-advised and therefore pathetic or tragic failures in practice,
according to these historians.
...John W. Burgess, founder of Columbia University’s
School of Political Science, which included all areas of learning that
later would be classified as social science, published a history of Reconstruction
in 1902. He called Negro suffrage a “monstrous thing” based on the illusion
that skin color bore no relation to intelligence or ethics. “A black skin,”
Burgess asserted, “means membership in a race of men which has never of
itself succeeded to reason, has never, therefore, created any civilization
of any kind.”
Edward A. Freeman, professor of history at
Oxford University, whose ideas about Teutonic origins of Anglo-Saxon democratic
institutions gave him considerable influence among historians in the United
States, compared Russian regulations that restricted the activities of
Jews with California laws aimed at Asians. “There is no religious persecution
in either case,” he wrote in 1882, “only the natural instinct of any decent
nation to get rid of filthy strangers.”...
The nation’s most influential anthropologists in
the late nineteenth century, including the illustrious John Wesley Powell,
director of the federal government’s Bureau of American Ethnology at the
Smithsonian Institution, subscribed in their published work to the concept
of Aryan, if not specifically to Anglo-Saxon, superiority. The physical
anthropologist Robert Bennett Bean diligently measured the brains
of 152 blacks and whites, paying particular attention to the size of frontal
lobes, believed to be the site of higher intellectual activity. Bean found
the brain size, and more significantly the frontal lobe size, of white
subjects consistently larger than that of blacks.
As a result of such evidence, even most of the humanitarian
reformers among late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social scientists
in the United States agreed that white, Protestant Americans, an obviously
superior race, deserved to rank highest in status. Sociologist Lester Frank
Ward,
an advocate of state intervention to promote democratic purposes, was genuinely
sympathetic with the plight of blacks in the South. Nevertheless, Ward
asserted that black women who submitted to rape by white men in the South
were motivated subconsciously by a desire to improve their race. Black
male rapists and members of the white lynch mobs that murdered them were
“impelled...by the biological law of self-preservation.”
Sociologist Edward A. Ross, who believed
that the chief purpose of sociology should be the improvement of human
relations, while addressing the American Academy of Political and Social
Science in 1901, warned that a further influx of Asian immigrants might
lead to the extinction of "true Americans." Sociologist Charles Horton
Cooley,
another opponent of laissez-faire economic individualism and of
eugenics, wrote that with great effort and patience Americans might assimilate
Slavs, Italians, and Jews -eventually- but never Negroes or Asians. Even
economist John Commons held conventional racist views.
Missionaries for Mammon
Rev. Frederick T. Gates, advisor on philanthropy to oil baron John
D. Rockefeller, Sr. 1905. With comments by P. Collier & D.
Horowitz from their The Rockefellers,
1976.
...The divine inspiration
of the missionary movement went hand in hand with its commercial shrewedness:
The fact is
that heathen nations are being everywhere honeycombed with light and with
civilization (Gates concluded),
with modern industrial life and applications of modern
science, through the direct
or indirect agencies of the missionaries. Quite apart from the
question of persons converted,
the mere commercial results of missionary effort to our own
land is worth, I had almost
said, a thousand-fold every year of what is spent on missions.
For illustration: Our commerce
today with the Hawaiian Islands ... is, I am told,
$17,000,000 per year. Five per
cent of that in one year would represent all the money that
ever was spent in christianizing
and civilizing the natives ... Missionaries and missionary
schools are introducing the
application of modern science, steam and electric power,
modern agricultural machinery
and modern manufacture into foreign lands. The result will
be eventually to multiply the
productive power of foreign countries many times. This will
enrich them as buyers of American
products and enrich us as importers of their products.
We are only in the very dawn
of commerce, and we owe that dawn, with all its promise, to
the channels opened up by Christian
missionaries.
This vision had been laid out for Junior and the other trustees of
the Rockefeller Foundation at its very first meeting. The
sense of world mission and the metaphors of conquest and salvation that
accompanied them were more than a literary flourish. Gates was an
avatar of an age of imperial optimism for the “English-speaking races”;
the duty to spread light to the dark continents was a common theme of those
like him who sought to promote America’s Christian and industrial stewardship
of the world.
V. Exoticized class
One further quick exemplary quote.
It's from Carol Ann Parssinen's "Social Explorers and Social Scientists:
The Dark Continent of Victorian Ethnography", in Crack
in the Rear-View Mirror (Jay Ruby, ed.,
1982). As always, I've omitted her citations, but she acknowledges a major
debt to Peter Keating's 1976 Into Unknown
England, 1866-1913. The point is that
social reformers who set out to interview and observe the lower-class of
England generally presented their venture as an excursion into the foreign.
"I commence with the first of these chapters, a book of travel.... I propose
to record the
result
of a journey into the region which lies at our own doors -into a dark continent
that
is
within easy walking distance of the General Post Office."
So George Sims introduced
his account of London slum life, How the Poor Live, in 1889. Sims
cast himself as an explorer who had journeyed into the unknown and returned
to tell his story. But the unknown was not a remote land or an exotic race:
rather it was the condition of life among London's urban poor, "a large
body of persons of whom the public had less knowledge than of the most
distant tribes of the earth" (Mayhew 1861 London Labour and the
London Poor).
From 1850-1910 England produced
a body of ethnographic literature written by men best characterized as
"social explorers." By profession these men were journalists, like Sims
or Henry Mayhew; reformers, like William Booth; or conscious social
investigators, like Charles Booth.; but they shared Sims's determination
to make public an alien culture set, paradoxically, right in their midst;
and they charted an essential methodology in seeking first-hand knowledge
of the poor and, in some cases, living among their subjects for short periods
of time.
...In the journey pattern
both explorer and reader can find a fit representation for their respective
roles and their relationship to each other: the explorer's actual movement
in time and space; his corresponding development from ignorance to knowledge,
and the reader's vicarious experience of the explorer's physical and educational
journeys. The logic of chronology becomes the logic of causality in a voyage
of discovery: The ways in which one sees become the products of what one
has seen already.
This same double journey -in
time and understanding- is the basic metaphor for professional ethnographic
research....
@on to Fee
on the Woman Problem
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readings