White World Order, Black Power Politics

The Birth of American International Relations

Robert Vitalis

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780801456695
• eBook ISBN: 9781501701870
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política mundial

Racism and imperialism are the twin forces that propelled the course of the United States in the world in the early twentieth century and in turn affected the way that diplomatic history and international relations were taught and understood in the American academy. Evolutionary theory, social Darwinism, and racial anthropology had been dominant doctrines in international relations from its beginnings; racist attitudes informed research priorities and were embedded in newly formed professional organizations. In White World Order, Black Power Politics, Robert Vitalis recovers the arguments, texts, and institution building of an extraordinary group of professors at Howard University, including Alain Locke, Ralph Bunche, Rayford Logan, Eric Williams, and Merze Tate, who was the first black female professor of political science in the country.Within the rigidly segregated profession, the "Howard School of International Relations" represented the most important center of opposition to racism and the focal point for theorizing feasible alternatives to dependency and domination for Africans and African Americans through the early 1960s. Vitalis pairs the contributions of white and black scholars to reconstitute forgotten historical dialogues and show the critical role played by race in the formation of international relations.

Part I

The Noble Science of Imperial Relations and Its Laws of Race Development

Political scientists in early twentieth-century America who traced the nineteenth-century origins of their field pointed to British theorist and statesman George Cornwall Lewis (1806–1863).¹ His best-known work is Essay on the Government of Dependencies (1841). Lewis defined the science of politics as comprised of three parts: the nature of the relation between a sovereign government and its subjects, the relation between the sovereign governments of independent communities, and “the relation of a dominant and a dependent community; or, in other words, the relation of supremacy and dependence.”² Modern writers, he said, had not yet taken up the nature of the political relation of supremacy and dependency in any systematic way.

Government of Dependencies was first reprinted fifty years later, a moment when modern writers—that is social scientists—were finally taking up Lewis’s challenge by founding a new American Political Science Association that would marshal the country’s burgeoning intellectual resources in support of the expanded empire. The central challenge that defined the new field called international relations was how to ensure the efficient political administration and race development of subject peoples, from the domestic dependencies and backward races at home to the complex race formations found in the new overseas territories and dependencies. What these generally younger, socialist-leaning, progressive political scientists saw as a bright new dawn for the discipline, the Anglo-Saxon race, and civilization, other social scientists saw instead as a dark and ignoble end of their own 20-year-long effort to bring “the searching light of reason to bear” upon problems of politics.³

The early decades of international relations in the United States is a story about empire. We know its outlines mainly due to the work of two historical-oriented specialists in international relations, David Long and Brian Schmidt.⁴ The historians of empire and of imperial anthropology have shown us that empire wasn’t easily pried apart from race in turn-of-the-century America, so the new disciplinary historians have gotten one important part of the account wrong. The problem is the current understanding of turn-of-the-century the place of race in the thought of social scientists of the era. The strand that still resonates in our own time about empire, states, and the like is considered to be the real scientific or theoretical core of the scholars’ work, while the strand that involves now-repudiated racial constructs is treated instead as mere “language,” “metaphors,” and “prejudices” of the era. To undo this error and recover in full the ideas of early international relations theorists it is necessary, as John Hobson has shown, to bring the work of historians of conservative and reform Darwinism to bear on the first specialists and foundational texts.

We will also need to loosen the hold a particular idea has over our contemporary imaginations—that the subject matter of international relations has forever been found on one side of a geographic border between the “domestic” and the “foreign”—because the scholars who wrote the first articles, papers, treatises, and textbooks in international relations all included the “Negro problem” in the South within the new field of study. Political scientists imagined two fundamentally different logics and processes at work and thus different rules that applied across the boundary dividing Anglo-Saxons or Teutons and the inferior races found in Indian Territory, New Mexico, the Philippines, the Caribbean, Africa, and Oceania. Here was the original and signal contribution of U.S. international relations to the theory and practice of hierarchy, a theory that W. E. B. Du Bois challenged in his continuing arguments about the global color line.

For those who studied fundamental problems of world order at the turn of the century, it was innovations in communications and transportation technologies combined with the unprecedented expansion of capital that had increased contact and thus the potential for conflict between the world’s superior and inferior races. Strategies for managing conflict or arresting the natural tendency toward war depended on a correct understanding of the way biology and environment determined and limited the prospects for civilizing the child races. Against the varieties of evolutionary theory offered up as explanation and justification for hierarchy, anthropologist Franz Boas and sociologist Du Bois both began in the late 1890s to explain hierarchy instead as the outcome of history, specifically, of colonial and mercantile capitalist expansion and of the transatlantic slave trade that secured the dominance of the West. Boas’s role in challenging the idea that hierarchy was natural and biologically rooted is well known. Du Bois’s parallel explications are both less well known and misunderstood.

Chapter 1

Empire by Association

In 1906, Alleyne Ireland (1871–1951), the traveler turned expert, read a paper at the third annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Providence on the growing interest in the theory of colonial administration. The subject was once treated as a “curious by-product rather than as a vital part of Political Science,” thus leaving the field to amateurs who had failed “to approach the colonial problem in that scientific spirit which in other departments of study is alone held to justify a public expression of opinion.”¹ While not a professor, Ireland was nonetheless seen by many as a pioneer in what he called the “science of imperial administration.” He earned this reputation after publishing Tropical Colonization: An Introduction to the Study of the Topic (1899). In 1901, the University of Chicago appointed him its colonial commissioner, a post that bought him two years of research for an ambitious eight-volume study on colonialism in all the Asian possessions of the United States, France, Britain, and the Netherlands.²

The development in political science Ireland trumpeted is obvious in retrospect. Professors had turned to the question of administration of empire even before founding the American Political Science Association in 1903. The two private eastern university–based political science academies had taken the lead in a series of conferences and in the pages of their respective journals. The American Academy of Political and Social Science, founded in Philadelphia in 1889, launched a bimonthly journal, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, in 1890. Harry Huntington Powers, a professor of romance languages turned economist, wrote the lead article in the September 1898 number, “The War as a Suggestion of Manifest Destiny.”³ Powers explained the war as the playing out of an irrepressible struggle for “race supremacy” that was leading rapidly to the necessary subjugation of the world’s dependent, weak, and uncivilized nations. Within “two centuries, perhaps in one,” only Slavs and Saxons would be left as major powers and would be locked in a struggle to rule the world, Powers predicted.

The academy followed this initial think piece with the first of its special-topics supplements to focus on U.S. foreign policy, a thick volume issued in May 1899 that began with a series of articles on the government of dependencies. By 1901, the academy had added a special department that focused on colonies and colonial government, and at the fifth annual meeting in Philadelphia in April of that year, its best attended to date, the speakers came to grips with the fact that the annexation of new territories had multiplied what were now “America’s race problems.”

It was hardly necessary for W. E. B. Du Bois, who had come up from Atlanta for the conference, to defend the claim he had made in his address to the American Negro Academy the month before that the color line was “the world problem of the twentieth century.”⁴ The transnational connections were clear (albeit not in the way Du Bois had envisioned) to those who gave papers on the races in the Pacific, the natives of Hawaii, the races and semi-civilized tribes of the Philippines, the Latin and African races in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and on the Negro question in the U.S. South, where the proven unfitness of African Americans for the ballot was a key reason for believing that all the other less civilized races that were now American dependents would likewise be unable to govern themselves.⁵

As Hilary Herbert, a member of Congress and onetime secretary of the navy lamented, “political science played no part” in the Reconstruction acts, since African Americans were allegedly unfit for participating in government, but Congress had passed them anyway. Herbert, who was there to introduce papers by Du Bois and George Winston, president of North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts, and Du Bois, ended his introduction with a quote as famous in some circles as Du Bois’s is about the color line in the twentieth century, “the granting of universal suffrage to the Negro was the mistake of the nineteenth century.”⁶

Edward Ross (1866–1951), a sociologist trained in Berlin and at Johns Hopkins who was the best-known scholar at the meeting, gave the keynote address. He used the occasion to elaborate a new theory of the sources of white racial superiority. This work was until recently misrepresented on the American Sociological Association Web site as a critique of racism.⁷ There were those, Ross said, under the sway of Darwin who exaggerated the fixed-race element of difference, which was as grave an error as those who believed in the “fallacy of equality” or “the power of intercourse and school instruction to lift up a backward folk to the level of the rest.” The sources of difference were subtler. Three factors made the Anglo-Saxon superior: energy, which varied inversely with adaptability to the tropics; self-reliance; and education.

Americans scored high on “tests of superiority” except in the South because of the presence there “of several millions of an inferior race.” What would sustain the superiority of Americans was “pride of blood” and “an uncompromising attitude toward the lower races,” which secured white men of North America freedom “from the ball and chain of hybridism” that had trapped the Spanish in America and the Portuguese in Brazil and East Africa. “Asiatics” posed the real challenge. They might arrive in the country, enjoy the equal opportunity afforded them, and reproduce at a vastly faster rate than whites, in which case Ross predicted one of three outcomes. Americans might degrade themselves by multiplying more indiscriminately; Asians might adopt the norms of whites, which he judged unlikely; or whites would silently commit “race suicide” as the “farm hand, mechanic, and operative…whither away.” Much hinged, then, on meeting the challenge immigration posed to white supremacy. Stem the tide and the white man would “play a brilliant and leading role on the stage of history” because of his capacity and efficiency, free institutions, and universal education.

What was left for W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), then still a mostly unknown sociologist but the one true giant at the Philadelphia meeting that weekend, was to cut through all the cant in defense of hierarchy.⁸ The world was witnessing a new phase in European civilization’s contact with “undeveloped peoples.”

Whatever we may say of the results of such contact in the past, it certainly forms a chapter in human action not pleasant to look back upon. War, murder, slavery, extermination and debauchery—this has again and again been the result of carrying civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of the sea and the heathen without the law.⁹

Du Bois presented the South as a case of the general phenomenon of race contact in order to challenge the propositions that passed for knowledge in a field “which the average American scientist deems somewhat beneath his dignity, and which the average man who is not a scientist knows all about.”¹⁰

He analyzed Jim Crow’s spatial segregation both as a purposeful project and one with a class dimension, similar to most other features of life in the Black Belt. The primary economic problem for African Americans was not how to turn ex-slaves into efficient workers. Rather, the problem was how to overcome slavery’s deleterious impact on generations and recognize the structural disadvantages that both black and white workers faced in the post-feudal, unregulated economy. Racism worsened the effects on black working life, leaving little hope of organizing cross-race associations. What was most needed, therefore, was an expanded set of black organizations founded by an expanded cadre of black leaders in defense of community interests. The primary tool in this endeavor was the ballot. Without political power, black people would continue to suffer at the hands of the police and courts and continue to be starved of the public resources necessary for advancement, beginning with decent schools. Over the long term, better education combined with improved political leadership would make his people better citizens.

Thus, there were not just two competing theories of world interracial relations in the United States at the turn of the century, as Cleland Boyd McAfee laid them out in the Journal of the Royal African Society just a few years later, but three. One theory insisted that black inferiority was real and ineradicable and thus that equality of any sort was logically impossible. Efforts by blacks to pursue the fantasy of equal rights would lead to increased conflict. The second theory recognized black inferiority as real but not “fundamental.” The dominant race would continue, necessarily, to dictate terms to the subordinate one but the fact of subordination need not end in conflict. It was possible to imagine forms of uplift that might over time make possible at least “some points of political, economic, and social equality available for some to-day and for the developed race ultimately.” McAfee used the example of Du Bois in fact to show the principle in action: “first-fruits of the new race, now inferior, ultimately not inferior to us though always different from us.”¹¹

Du Bois challenged both schools with his sustained critique of international hierarchy and of the racialism the West used to buttress it. The key pieces of this antiracist and internationalist perspective were in place in the essay he published in the Annals in 1901. He showed that the modern history of civilization building was undeniably brutal and exploitative, however much those who benefited from empire denied it. He linked his argument to the principle that the darker peoples of the world had the same rights of political self-determination as the lighter races. It was the same claim that he had put forward nine months earlier in his speech titled “To the Nations of the World” at the first Pan-African Congress in London.¹² He acknowledged “that it is possible and sometimes best that a partially undeveloped people should be ruled by the best of their stronger and better neighbors for their own good, until such time as the can start and fight the world’s battles alone,” but this was a frank recognition that sovereignty would be difficult to secure against rival imperial complexes.¹³ Du Bois also decoupled strategies of tutelage from a belief in racial inferiority.¹⁴ Above all, Du Bois was pursuing the idea that the world was thinking wrong about race.¹⁵

Du Bois’s arguments gained wider notoriety with the publication of Souls of Black Folk in 1903, the “electrifying manifesto” that in the words of...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. The Noble Science of Imperial Relations and Its Laws of Race Development
• Part II. Worlds of Color
• Part III. The North versus the Black Atlantic
• Part IV. “The Dark World Goes Free”
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index