Race and the Making of American Political Science. Jessica Blatt

Indeed, if Burgess’s life’s work began to come clear to him on the Civil War battlefield, it crystallized again in an encounter with Reconstruction-era Tennessee. That “mournful experience” appears in his memoir as follows: “My own parents as well as all my former friends were living in more or less of distress and poverty, and the entire political and social structure was demoralized. It was in the midst of the so-called carpet-bag era, when the respectable and intelligent white people were disenfranchised and ignored, and the negroes, led by Northern adventurers, ruled and plundered the land. Neither property nor life nor chastity was safe, and men and women of the better sort longed to be laid at rest.”

      In Burgess’s retelling, this spectacle prompted him to resolve “again that if the Providence which conducts the affairs of men would only sustain and direct me, I would give my life to the work of substituting reason for passion in determining the course of States and nations.” A “thoroughly impartial” accounting of the Civil War and Reconstruction would be part of this work, helping to elicit from the north a “sincere and genuine acknowledgement” that Reconstruction had been blundered. This was necessary to secure “real national brotherhood” between southern and northern whites. Burgess saw the Hayes-Tilden compromise, which effectively ended Reconstruction, as the first step toward just such an admission, however tacit. As he put it, the North was “learning every day by valuable experience that there are vast differences in political capacity between the races.”⁵¹

      Furthering the work of this anything but “impartial” accounting were Burgess’s junior colleague, the political theorist and historian William Archibald Dunning, and a group of younger, mostly Southern historians whom the two men trained at Columbia.⁵² One of Burgess’s prize pupils, Dunning did his doctorate at Columbia and remained there for the rest of his career, rapidly rising to the Lieber professorship of history and political philosophy. Thirteen years younger than Burgess, and a northerner by birth (from Plainfield, New Jersey), educated at Dartmouth College and in New York and Berlin, Dunning shared neither Burgess’s firsthand experience of the Civil War battlefield nor his personal stake in Reconstruction. All the same, perhaps even more than his older colleague, Dunning was responsible for elevating the study of that period to a central place in American historiography and political analysis and for constructing an image of it that commanded widespread scholarly acceptance for most of the twentieth century. Burgess and Dunning’s students produced a raft of state-level studies that, with varying degrees of vitriol, denounced the corruption of “carpetbaggers,” “scalawags,” and black legislators and glorified the efforts of white “redeemers” to resist “Africanizing” the southern states.⁵³ For their part, Burgess and Dunning contributed sweeping, synthetic interpretations of Reconstruction as the tragic misadventure of a Radical Republican Congress in thrall to delusions of natural equality.⁵⁴ As both made clear, these were not conclusions of purely historical interest. Each was adamant that the lessons of 1816 through Reconstruction needed to be applied to pressing, current questions of immigration, the emerging regulatory state, and world affairs. And Burgess put his understanding of Reconstruction at the heart of the account of history, political change, and the sources of sovereignty and democratic legitimacy on which he built his political science.

       The Teutonic “State” and the Science of History

      Bryce observed, not without apprehension, that “one of the greatest achievements of science” up to his lifetime had been “making the world small.”⁵⁵ This meant, above all, a new world of migration and contact between races. Burgess, too, viewed this development with alarm. He saw that his generation had paid the price for the failure of unenlightened nationalism and eighteenth-century philosophy alike to appreciate properly the sources of national cohesion, the significance of racial difference, and the place of each in the progress of history. The new professional political science he sought to lead would, he hoped, avoid the same mistake for the twentieth century.

      For Bryce, scientific advances may have been contributing to the problem, but scientific inquiry also promised to reveal solutions, or at least proper responses.⁵⁶ And for scholars of politics in the United States at the time, “science” signified above all the science of history. Both Burgess and Bryce were steeped in “Teutonism” or “Anglo-Saxonism.” This school of historical interpretation, much in vogue in England and America in the mid-nineteenth century, emphasized the continuity of history, holding that English and American institutions reflected an unbroken line of evolutionary development from antecedents in the ancient Germanic forests. Bryce was schooled in this tradition by the English historian E. A. Freeman, and his work reflects the Teutonist emphasis on both Anglo-Saxon supremacy and the centrality of race to political life more broadly.⁵⁷ However, Bryce himself was more interested in the newness and innovations to be found in America, and his celebrated American Commonwealth moved away from Teutonism’s emphasis on continuous development in favor of dense description of the country as he found it.

      Burgess, however, put Teutonism front and center as he elaborated what was to become the dominant theoretical framework for university-based political science in the United States in the Gilded Age. This was the idea, laid out most thoroughly in Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law, that sovereignty and legitimacy were to be found in an organic, racialized unity termed “the state” that stood in “back of” and “distributed” its power to institutions of governance.⁵⁸ Midcentury northern publicists, notably Lieber, had used similar language to recruit Anglo-Saxonism to the cause of the Union, basing the Constitution’s authority in an “ethnoracial nation” deeper than and previous to any contract between states.⁵⁹ This idea was to hold great appeal for scholars in the 1880s and 1890s. Indeed, for Burgess, “the state” was the key to a scientific study of politics, and racial homogeneity was the key to the state’s development.

      The state was at once spiritual and material, universal and embodied—Hegelian idealism infused with late nineteenth-century racial anthropology and social evolutionism.⁶⁰ It represented “the gradual and continuous development of human society … [and] of the universal principles of human nature” but was at the same time rooted in the “ethnologic concept” of the “nation” and “relations of birth and race-kinship.” Only the Teutonic (or Aryan) nations inherited the capacity to realize the highest form of the state. Latin and Greek civilizations had more limited political genius; Asia and Africa were home to only “unpolitical nations.”⁶¹

      There was little that was original or idiosyncratic in the basic outlines of Teutonist state theory. Anglo-Saxonist history was well established, and the Gilded Age “saw Anglo-Saxon chauvinism pervade the upper reaches of American scholarly and political life.”⁶² Burgess’s achievement, which he shared to an extent with the Johns Hopkins University historian Herbert Baxter Adams, was to modernize this tradition, pursuing it with the zeal for rigorous, empirical methodology that was the hallmark of German historiography and embedding it in a newly professionalizing discipline.⁶³

      The German approach involved above all commitment to a Rankean reconstruction of the past “as it really was” through painstaking work with primary sources as well as archaeological, geographic, philological, and other scientific investigation.⁶⁴ And, indeed, both Burgess and Adams grounded their work in voluminous, careful, legal and historical research. They were also affected by the excitement that a progressionist version of Darwinism, along with Herbert Spencer’s application of it to the social world, generated among late nineteenth-century scholars, who were evolutionists “almost to a man.”⁶⁵ As a result, Adams and Burgess produced versions of Teutonism that differed from their predecessors’ in being more pronouncedly laced with metaphors and assertions from ethnology and biology.⁶⁶ And of course the fact that they operated within universities where they were able to establish graduate programs meant that their Teutonism became the basis for training a generation of younger American scholars.

      In Adams’s case, scientific history translated into minute excavations of the evolution of this or that New England tradition (town forms, traditional offices, etc.) from early Germanic prototypes, an enterprise that came to be known as “Teutonic germ theory.”⁶⁷ Proud to have established his history seminar