by John Marini
Merriam was not unique in his view that the American Founders had misunderstood the meaning of liberty. He was well aware that the Southern opinion had differed from the view of the Founders. Furthermore, in looking at recent trends in scholarship, Merriam observed,
The modern school has, indeed, formulated a new idea of liberty, widely different from that taught in the early years of the Republic. The “Fathers” believed that in the original state of nature all men enjoy perfect liberty, that they surrender a part of this liberty in order that a government may be organized, and that therefore the stronger the government, the less the liberty remaining to the individual. Liberty is, in short, the natural and inherent right of all men; government the necessary limitation of this liberty. Calhoun and his school, as it has been shown, repudiated this idea, and maintained that liberty is not the natural right of all men, but only the reward of the races or individuals properly qualified for its possession. Upon this basis, slavery was defended against the charge that it was inconsistent with human freedom, and in this sense and so applied; the theory was not accepted outside the South. The mistaken application of the idea had the effect of delaying recognition of the truth in what had been said until the controversy over slavery was at an end.30
The remarkable assertion that slavery had obscured the truth of the historical and scientific fact that race established the ground of liberty and political right was not uncommon among the Progressives. Merriam, consequently, agreed with Calhoun: “Not only are men created unequal … but this very inequality must be regarded as one of the essential conditions of human progress.… This fundamental fact that individuals or races are unequal, is not an argument against, but rather in favor of, social and political advancement.”31
It is not surprising that the new disciplines of the social sciences, including political science, were almost unanimous in their rejection of the doctrine of natural right, the principle of equality, and the social compact. The social sciences rejected slavery, but the rejection was on the ground that slavery was an historical anachronism. This view was confirmed by the events of history, as evidenced in the victory of the Union armies. It made it possible, subsequently, to defend the new scientific understanding that political capacity, or the suitability for self-government and freedom, was dependent upon the progress of the races. As Merriam had noted in his defense of Calhoun, it was the “mistaken application of the idea” of racial superiority in the defense of slavery that “had the effect of delaying recognition of the truth in what had been said until the controversy over slavery was at an end.”32 In Merriam’s view, Calhoun’s theory had been vindicated only after the institution of slavery had been destroyed. With the end of slavery, it had become possible to see the historical and scientific truth that only certain races were capable of self-government.
The historians’ admiration of Lincoln rested upon what they considered an historic achievement, the establishment of the modern state or nation. Lincoln’s own understanding of his actions in defense of constitutionalism was dependent upon the necessity of upholding the conditions of the social compact, which required a reaffirmation of the founding principles of the regime. Yet, the Progressives interpreted his role as an historical vindication of the idea of the state and the denial of the social compact as the foundation of constitutionalism. Charles Merriam, commenting on what he perceived to be the fundamental accomplishment of Lincoln, observed, “In the new national school, the tendency was to disregard the doctrine of the social contract, and to emphasize strongly the instinctive forces, whose action and interaction produces a state. This distinction was developed by Lieber, who held that the great difference between ‘people’ and ‘nation’ lies in the fact that the latter possess organic unity.… In general, the new school thought of the Union as organic rather than contractual in nature.” As Merriam noted, “The contract philosophy was in general disrepute, and … the overwhelming tendency was to look upon the nation as an organic product, the result of an evolutionary process.”33
Merriam concluded that it had become necessary to recognize the fact that the concept of the nation was dependent upon a theoretical understanding of the state. The notion of a people, on the other hand, can only be understood with reference to the theory of a social compact made by individuals. Thus, Merriam insisted that the “[N]ation carried with it the idea of an ethnic and geographic unity, constituted without the consent of any one in particular; ‘people’ was understood to be a body formed by a contract between certain individuals. The very fact that the Union was ‘pinned together with bayonets’ was enough to show that the doctrine of voluntary consent had faded into the background.”34 In the modern state, it was no longer necessary to establish the legitimacy of government by securing the consent of the governed. Merriam assumed that because the Southern states had not been allowed to secede from the Union, the social compact—like slavery—had become an historical anachronism.
For Merriam, the Civil War itself had destroyed the conditions of the social compact. He concluded:
[T]he general idea was that the United States, by virtue of the community of race, interests, and geographical location, ought to be and is a nation; and ought to be held together by force, if no other means would avail. This was the feeling that underlay the great national movement of 1861–1865, and it could not fail to be reflected in the philosophy of that time and in the succeeding interpretations of that event.35
History itself had provided the ground of the new theory. Like evolution, success in the struggle had proved the rightness of the cause. Lincoln, who had tried to preserve a regime of civil and religious liberty based on the principles of the American Founding, was celebrated by Progressive social scientists and historians for having established a modern state.
The Southern intellectuals had rejected Lincoln’s understanding of the meaning of equality as an abstract truth, which was the way it had been understood by the American Founders. But the Northern intellectuals had also rejected Lincoln’s defense of the principle of equality. They insisted that the idea of equality had been undermined by the discoveries of the new biological and social sciences. Thus Charles Merriam insisted, “From the standpoint of modern political science the slaveholders were right in declaring that liberty can be given only to those who have political capacity enough to use it, and they were also right in maintaining that two greatly unequal races cannot exist side by side on terms of perfect equality.”36 Furthermore, Merriam agreed with the Southerners that “rights do not belong to men simply as men, but because of the superior qualities, physical, intellectual, moral or political, which are characteristic of certain individuals or races.”37 The denial that the principle of natural human equality was a standard for political right made it impossible to defend equality as the fundamental ground of citizenship. The new sciences had established race and class as the necessary foundation of political and social life. As a result, equal citizenship based on an understanding of individual natural rights was no longer intelligible as a practical matter.
Nearly all of the scholarly opinion following the Civil War was critical of the North’s attempt to establish the former slaves as equal citizens. The North was condemned for extending the franchise, and the South was praised for obstructing black voting. The leading political scientist of the day, Columbia’s John W. Burgess, observed that “it is the white man’s mission, his duty and his right, to hold the reins of political power in his own hands.”38 He further wrote, “The claim that there is nothing in the color of the skin from the point of view of political ethics is a great sophism. A black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself succeeded … to reason, has never, therefore, created any civilization of any kind.”39 By the end of the nineteenth century the authority of science had come to buttress the claims of historicism. It was as though the theories of Darwin and Hegel had been merged.
It is instructive to see how the historians of the time had come to understand Reconstruction
. James Ford Rhodes,
who wrote the first detailed study of the Reconstruction period, fully subscribed to the idea that Negroes were innately inferior and incapable of citizenship … Rhodes thought it a great pity that the North had been unwilling to listen to such men of science as Louis Agassiz who could have told them that the Negroes were unqualified for citizenship. “What the whole country has only learned through years of costly and bitter experience,” declared Rhodes, “was known to this leader of scientific thought before we ventured on the policy of trying to make negroes intelligent by legislative acts: and this knowledge was to be had for the asking by the men who were shaping the policy of the nation.”40
The learned opinion of the time was summed up in a single sentence by William A. Dunning of Columbia University. He noted that the whole difficulty of Reconstruction stemmed from the fact that the “antithesis and antipathy of race and color were crucial and ineradicable.”41 In looking back on that period, nearly every historian has considered Reconstruction to be a political failure. But, given the intellectual opinion of the time, it is hard to see how it could have succeeded.
Immigration Law and Citizenship
The importance of race or class for an understanding of immigration and citizenship in the last part of the nineteenth century cannot be overstated. As I have shown above, the concept of race was first understood within the framework of a philosophy of History. In the nineteenth century it came to be understood as a category of science. It was Robert Knox in 1850 who “reintroduced the notion of race into biology,”42 and the newly formed social sciences were quick to adopt the science of race and eugenics. But with the development of the modern university, the idea of the state also came to be understood on the basis of culture as derivative of the discovery of the historical sense. In the new discipline of political science, John Burgess argued, “the State is the national community, and the government is the agent of the State.” According to Burgess, “The American state, however, had a longer genealogy and a ‘transcendent mission.’ It was rooted historically in a ‘predominant Teutonic nationality,’ and it was destined to be ‘the perfection of the Aryan genius for political civilization.’ This meant that it was essential neither to ‘sectionalize’ it into states nor to ‘pollute’ it with non-Aryan elements.”43
It was not long before the idea that race was the ground of American citizenship came to dominate the debate concerning immigration. As Daniel Tichenor has observed, Francis Walker, president of MIT and former chief of the national census, “was among the first prominent intellectuals to apply Darwinian and Spencerian theories of racial hierarchy to the new European immigration.”44 Walker was concerned that immigration “was increasingly drawn from the nations of southern and eastern Europe—peoples which have got no great good for themselves out of the race wars of centuries, and out of the unceasing struggle with the hard conditions of nature … and that have thus far remained hopelessly upon the lowest plane of life.”45 In Walker’s view, Darwinian evolutionary theory had provided the best means for determining character and the capacity for citizenship.
In the early 1890s, Walker had “embraced Teutonic theory to justify excluding newer European immigrants. ‘They have none of the inherited instincts and tendencies which made it comparatively easy to deal with immigration of olden time.… They are beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence.’”46 Walker is not wrong in suggesting that immigration policy must take into account the distinctions between nations in terms of judging the character of prospective citizens. Of course, the American social compact would benefit most from citizens who are likely to value freedom, and presumably they would come from non-despotic and well-governed stable regimes. However, it was not clear that the historical notion of race, a new scientific construct in Walker’s time, which denied that the principle of equality must be understood in terms of nature and natural right, had been responsible for the success of any particular regime.
The new understanding of race was not merely a descriptive account of the differences that exist among men, the result of the variety of regimes, languages, religions, and colors. That kind of knowledge had always been understood in terms of common sense and politics—as friends and enemies, or citizens and strangers. The category of race when linked to science came to be used as a means of distinguishing superior and inferior humans solely by consideration of what had been a new construct—race. Indeed, the new science of eugenics, founded in the 1880s by Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, had gained popularity as a means of promoting or discouraging population growth by distinguishing between the superior races that ought to produce more offspring and the inferior races that ought to produce less.
As Jay Varma has observed, it was not long before “the concept that ethnic groups were biologically distinct races entered popular discourse with the institutionalization of the science of eugenics in the early 1900s … which had evolved into the study of racial differences and was defined as ‘the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generation, either physically or mentally.’”47 By the time race had come to be understood as the exclusive consideration for citizenship within the state, its corollary, the unlimited power of government, had become legitimized. The new regulatory power of government offered the possibility of using the science of eugenics not merely for making distinctions among immigrant groups, but also for establishing ranks among citizens as well.
Citizenship, the American Founders had argued, need not be established on the basis of a common faith or common blood. Rather, they believed that a common idea, the belief in the abstract truth that all men are created equal, must provide the only foundation of citizenship. But, once again, with the new authority of science and historicism, there would be a concerted attempt for the next half century to establish citizenship upon the foundation of race. Consequently, it was the principle of equality that would become the casualty of that transformation in the meaning of citizenship.
Daniel Tichenor has pointed to the change: “Drawing inspiration from the new scientific research, Progressive Era restrictionists aimed to build a national regulatory system that excluded immigrants of national and ethnic groups they deemed inferior. Certain that crucial racial distinctions existed between Europeans, they yearned for new immigration barriers to guard the nation from the contamination of southern and eastern Europeans.”48 In the next decades, many authors, including Clinton Stoddard Burr in America’s Race Heritage, Madison Grant in The Passing of the Great Race, and Charles W. Gould in America: A Family Matter, insisted that the white race could be divided into a hierarchy of three races: the Mediterranean, Alpine, and Nordic. It was Mediterranean race, primarily southern and eastern Europeans, but particularly Russian Jews, who were lowest on the scale, with the Alpines on a somewhat higher level. But the Nordics were considered the superior race. Indeed, Burr goes so far as to suggest, that “Americanism is actually the racial thought of the Nordic race, evolved after a thousand years of experience.”49 If the European races could be distinguished in such a manner, it was not surprising that the other races were thought to be even further down the scale in terms of intelligence and capacity for self-government.
The first piece of legislation in American history, at the national level, to exclude immigrants on the basis of a scientific understanding of race did not occur until 1882. However, that act did not attempt to exclude Europeans because of race. Rather, the new immigration act resulted in the exclusion of the Chinese, who had become a political problem in California. The Chinese had not been assimilated easily into American society, so the case for exclusion was not difficult to make. But it was the growing awareness of the importance of race to membership in the new organic state that fueled the demand among many intellectuals and politicians for restricting those who could not be assimilated into society. Daniel Tichenor has observed that “Chinese exclusion called for the federal gove
rnment to assume unprecedented regulatory authority over immigrant admissions and rights for the explicit purpose of guarding the racial purity of American society. Indeed, most advocates of Chinese exclusion shared a strong ‘sense of the state’—one that linked national state-building to the preservation of existing orders of ethnic, racial, and religious hierarchy.”50
The Chinese case is instructive, therefore, because that exclusion was defended on the ground of a new understanding of race and science as decisive for determining capacity for citizenship. It was thought that only those of common blood—whose superiority and thus qualification for membership in the state is determined by science—can be eligible for citizenship. If the state is the manifestation of a moral will, and will becomes intelligible as an embodiment of a people through race, citizenship in the state must be understood to be derived from the fundamental inequality of man as established by the differences among the races.
It is clearly the case that not everyone is entitled to citizenship in America, or any other sovereign nation. Immigrants can be excluded on the basis of race, religion, nationality, illiteracy, or many other reasons. That is because republican governments, unlike despotic regimes, must take into account the character of its potential citizens. Prior to the Civil War, the social compact was understood in terms of the principles of equality and liberty. Thus, as noted above, the problem of immigration was understood in terms of prudence or morality. Throughout the early part of the nineteenth century, there had been considerable political pressure to pass national legislation restricting immigration on the basis of religion, nationality, color, or language. Protestants wanted to restrict Irish Catholics because of their religion. But they could never persuade Congress to pass legislation banning immigration on the ground of religious differences. Nonetheless, there were numerous restrictions based on health, disease, mental disability, and character or morals—such as preventing prostitutes and criminals, or those of unsavory character, from becoming citizens.51