The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  Several luminaries played their part. Sam Houston (1793–1863), leader of the Texas revolution, president of the Republic of Texas, then governor and senator from the state of Texas, cobbled together a theory about the difference between old and new immigrants that functioned well into the twentieth century. For Houston, the founding fathers and heroes of the American Revolution constituted the fine old immigrants, in sharp contrast to the new immigrants of the 1850s, people “spewed loathingly from the prisons of England, and from the pauper houses of Europe.”37

  Ulysses S. Grant (1822–85), only a decade from the U.S. presidency, pitied himself for his lack of “privileges” compared with German job seekers who seemed to have all the luck. During the Civil War, seizing a chance to legalize his prejudices, Grant enacted one of the rare nineteenth-century anti-Semitic policies. Called General Orders No. 11, it expelled all Jews, including families with children, from the Department of Tennessee in December of 1862. Grant’s excuse? He insisted that he had to control Jewish peddlers. In fact, his directive affected all Jews in Tennessee, no matter their vocation, sex, or age. President Abraham Lincoln quickly rescinded the order, but not before several families were displaced.38

  In the South, Know-Nothings also did well in the mid-1850s elections. An Alabama Know-Nothing congressman spoke for many when he declaimed, “I do not want the vermin-covered convicts of the European continent…. I do not want those swarms of paupers, with pestilence in their skins, and famine in their throats, to consume the bread of the native poor. Charity begins at home—charity forbids the coming of these groaning, limping vampires.”39 This kind of proclamation played as well in the South, with its few immigrants, as in the North, with its many.

  Eventually, as we know, fundamental political tensions destroyed Know-Nothingism as slavery—the elephant in the American living room—bumped about more aggressively. In 1855 the question of slavery in the Nebraska Territory set southern Know-Nothings on one side, demanding explicit safeguards for slavery, and northerners on the other, refusing to go along. Once the slavery issue split the Know-Nothing movement along sectional lines, the newly founded Republican Party picked up northern Know-Nothings unwilling to bow to southern devotion to slavery. In the South, Know-Nothings rejoined or ceded to Democrats. The split did not signal the definitive end of nativism. For instance, the Know-Nothing candidate for president in 1856, the former Whig president Millard Fillmore, polled some 800,000 votes, or over one-fifth of those cast nationwide, although he carried only the state of Maryland. Democrats elected James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, their last successful presidential candidate until the 1884 election of Grover Cleveland. Slowly the worst violence associated with Catholic hating in the United States ended, but poor Irish Catholics remained a race apart—Celts. At the same time, nine-tenths of African Americans remained enslaved, and they were not only abused as an inferior race: they were seldom counted as Americans. Towering over the notion of two inferior races, Celt and African, the figure of the Saxon monopolized the identity of the American. But at least the Celts had their whiteness.

  10

  THE EDUCATION OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) towers over his age as the embodiment of the American renaissance, but not, though he also should, as the philosopher king of American white race theory. Widely hailed for his intellectual strength and prodigious output, Emerson wrote the earliest full-length statement of the ideology later termed Anglo-Saxonist, synthesizing all the salient nineteenth-and early twentieth-century concepts of American whiteness. (See figure 10.1, Ralph Waldo Emerson.)

  A quintessential New Englander born in Boston, Emerson descended from a family of scholarly ministers whose American roots reached back to 1635. Emerson’s esteemed father, the Reverend William Emerson, had delivered a Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard—just as his son would a generation later—and served as pastor at Boston’s First Church. Such a lofty perch, while conferring eminent respectability, did not guarantee financial security even while the Reverend William Emerson lived. His death, when Waldo was not quite eight years old, plunged the family into outright hardship. Luckily Waldo’s diminutive aunt—she stood four feet three inches tall—Mary Moody Emerson (1774–1863) was there to fill a crucial gap in his education at home.*

  An 1814 American edition of de Staël’s On Germany had introduced German romanticism and the wisdom of India to intellectual Americans like Mary Moody Emerson. She kept the book at hand throughout her life and used it to transmit her enthusiasm for de Staël and German romanticism to her nephew before, during, and after his formal studies.1 He had a good, traditional New England education, attending the Boston Latin School, then following his forebears to Harvard College, where he waited on tables to cover tuition. He taught school for four years before enrolling in the Harvard Divinity School, which he left as a Unitarian minister in 1829. That same year he married Ellen Louisa Tucker and became minister of Boston’s Second Church.

  EMERSON’S FASCINATION with German thought was practically foreordained. At Harvard he studied with the confirmed romanticists George Ticknor and Edward Everett, two young scholars recently returned from studies at Göttingen’s Georg-August University. Well schooled by Aunt Mary, Emerson had incorporated her comments into his Harvard senior essay, winning second prize in 1821. Even his older brother, William, pitched in, going abroad to study at Göttingen in 1824–25 and writing home to Waldo urging him “to learn German as fast as you can” in order to follow him to Germany.2

  Fig. 10.1. Ralph Waldo Emerson carte-de-visite.

  German thought filled the air around Boston’s young intellectuals. In the 1820s Emerson read English writers like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had studied at Göttingen with Blumenbach,3 and William Wordsworth, both necessary guides into things German since Emerson never gained great competence in the German language. All in all, his Harvard study, Aunt Mary Moody Emerson’s keenness for German romanticism, and Germaine de Staël’s On Germany propelled Emerson ever deeper into study of German philosophy and literature.

  TRANSCENDENTALISM, THE American version of German romanticism (à la Kant, Fichte, Goethe, and the Schlegel brothers), flourished in New England, particularly in eastern Massachusetts, from the mid-1830s into the 1840s. German transcendentalism offered an odd mixture, including even a hefty dose of Indian mysticism inspired by Friedrich von Schlegel, which Mary Emerson had also found congenial.* In place of established Christian religion (particularly the then prevailing Unitarianism), transcendentalism offered a set of romantic notions about nature, intuition, genius, individualism, the workings of the Spirit, and, especially, the character of religious conviction. At bottom, it prized intuition over study and emphasized the idea of an indwelling god who unified all creation. Guided by Aunt Mary, Emerson borrowed transcendentalism’s focus on nature as a spiritual force for his essay Nature (1836), now considered the transcendentalists’ manifesto.4†

  Most leading New England transcendentalists had attended Harvard College, and many had continued into Harvard’s Divinity School preparing for the Unitarian ministry. Emerson fits the mold perfectly in several ways, as a minister and as one who resigned his pulpit after a crisis of faith. Even after leaving the ministry, however, Emerson remained intrigued throughout his life by the religious dimension of transcendentalism. In Nature he announces American transcendentalism as a new way of conceiving spirituality, amplified two years later in his classic Divinity School Address.*

  WITHIN THIS German-driven transcendental swirl, one man, an Englishman, stood tallest: he was Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881). (See figure 10.2, Thomas Carlyle.) A reedy, stooped six-footer and a lifelong hypochondriac, Carlyle was usually half sick with a cold. The twenty-four-year-old Emerson (also tall, thin, and hypochondriac) discovered Carlyle’s unsigned reviews in the Edinburgh Review and the Foreign Review in 1827 and began to hail the British author as his “Germanick new-light writer,” as well as “perhaps now the best Thinker of the Saxon race.”5 C
learly Carlyle’s take on German mysticism would lay the foundation for American transcendentalism.

  Actually, Carlyle was, geographically speaking, just barely a “Thinker of the Saxon race,” having been born in Scotland in the little town of Ecclefechan, eight miles from the English border.† This provenance counted heavily for Carlyle, who wished to be known as a southern Scot, that is, as a Saxon rather than a Celt—the northern Scots, to his mind being the latter and therefore, as we have seen in this mind-set, inferior.

  After study at the University of Edinburgh, Carlyle, like many other English speakers, encountered German thought in de Staël’s On Germany in 1817. So impressed was he that he sent his future wife, Jane Welsh, a copy of de Staël’s novel Delphine. Furthermore, what he saw in On Germany—with its racial introduction, its elevation of Goethe to mythic status, and its concluding section on German transcendental mysticism—encouraged Carlyle to study German. This enthusiasm for the German language and its literature gained him employment as a German tutor in Scotland and motivated his translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship in 1824, which he sent along to Goethe in Weimar. That opening inaugurated a respectful correspondence lasting until Goethe’s death in 1832.6

  Carlyle actually came to think of Goethe as “a kind of spiritual father,” and took upon himself the task of spreading the transcendental gospel.7 And spread it he did, writing the magazine articles Emerson was reading in New England in the late 1820s and early 1830s, many of them reviews of German authors and essays on German thought.8 Like Carlyle, Emerson worshipped Goethe throughout his scholarly life. So thorough was this adoration that Goethe’s Italienische Reise shaped Emerson’s European itinerary of 1833, dictating a first stop in Rome.9 Emerson even began collecting Goethe statuettes and portraits and named the Emerson family cat “Goethe.”10

  Emerson was thirty when he first saw Europe. By then he had left his pastorate and lost his beloved young wife to tuberculosis two years after their marriage. Now he poured energy into seeing for himself the luminaries of this new philosophy. Coleridge and Wordsworth came first, and both disappointed Emerson greatly. He found Coleridge “a short, thick old man [who] took snuff freely, which presently soiled his cravat and neat black suit.” Even worse was Wordsworth who abused the beloved Goethe and Carlyle and nattered on as though reading aloud from his books. Wordsworth later sneered at Emerson as well, calling him “a pest of the English tongue” and lumping him with Carlyle as philosophers “who have taken a language which they suppose to be English for their vehicle…and it is a pity that the weakness of our age has not left them exclusively to the appropriate reward, mutual admiration.” Emerson felt he had spent an hour with a parrot.11

  Fig. 10.2. Thomas Carlyle.

  The visit in Scotland with Carlyle, however, went perfectly. Much younger than Coleridge and Wordsworth, Carlyle captivated Emerson through a day and a night of passionate exchange chock full of fresh ideas expressed energetically. At this point neither man had published canonical work, but recognizing kindred spirits, they fell into each other’s arms, initiating a lifelong correspondence that even weathered ideological strains over slavery and the American Civil War. Mutual support immensely enhanced both their careers.

  At the time of Emerson’s visit, Carlyle’s novel Sartor Resartus had reached the public only in magazine form, and little wonder, for this ponderous, autobiographical tale drags English readers through a morass of German transcendentalism and the mysticism of Immanuel Kant, with nothing of de Staël’s clarity. Carlyle’s novel is clotted with German, making it a hard sell in Britain; its protagonist, for instance, bears the challenging name Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. While a later admirer would pronounce Sartor Resartus part of a “great spiritual awakening of the Teutonic race,” at the time, only two readers that we know of lauded its magazine publication: a Father O’Shea of Cork, Ireland, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.12*

  In fact, without Emerson’s tireless promotion, Carlyle’s writing career might have ended there. But Emerson took Carlyle’s novel in hand, shepherding an American edition into print and contributing a preface. With this help, the thumping, clamorous, and obscure style of Sartor Resartus electrified the Americans becoming known as transcendentalists: Theodore Parker spoke admiringly of a “German epidemic,” and William Ellery Channing experienced it as a “quickener” of his own ideas.13 Thanks to Emerson, an American edition of Carlyle’s French Revolution soon followed. The first money—£50—that Carlyle ever earned through his writing came from Emerson, acting as Carlyle’s agent in the United States over the course of several years.14 Indeed, Emerson made Carlyle more popular by far in America than he had ever been in Great Britain. Carlyle returned the favor, launching Emerson’s career in the United Kingdom with the 1841 publication of Essays. Carlyle’s advocacy had a number of English critics calling Emerson a Yankee genius, a sterling compliment since “genius” offered the romantics’ highest form of praise.

  Given Emerson’s inability to read German very well, Carlyle stepped in as his teacher of transcendentalism, and not always an uncritical one. Early in their friendship Carlyle recognized the derivative nature of Emerson’s thought, explaining later “that Emerson had, in the first instance, taken his system out of ‘Sartor’ and other of [Carlyle’s] writings, but he worked it out in a way of his own.”15 Before meeting Emerson, the prominent English academic Henry Crabb Robinson, a founder of University College, London, had dismissed him as “a Yankee writer who has been puffed by [Carlyle] into English notoriety” but who was “a bad imitator of Carlyle who himself imitates Coleridge ill, who is a general imitator of the Germans.” (Once they met, Robinson’s view of Emerson softened.) John Ruskin’s estimation of Emerson wavered over time; at one point Ruskin, one of England’s leading intellectuals, considered Emerson “only a sort of cobweb over Carlyle.”16

  This image of Emerson as a watered-down Carlyle-Teutonist never entirely dissipated, just as critics of Carlyle, Emerson, and transcendentalists have harped on the Teutonic opacity of their style. Southern critics, perhaps naturally, amplified these charges by tacking on an anti–New England, anti-antislavery twist. As the American sectional crisis deepened in the 1850s and Emerson spoke more pointedly against slavery and the slave power, a southern animus against him grew.17*

  On the other hand, Americans adored Carlyle’s emphatic writing style and his apparent, if vague, sympathy for ordinary people and a disdain for the elite. Even Garrisonian abolitionists and feminists who advocated civil rights for all, seemed blind to the broader tendency of his politics. By 1840 Carlyle had come to despise their movement outright and deprecate the whole notion of universal human rights. Had they read him attentively, American fans would have realized this. But they did not. Antislavery Americans visiting London for the World Anti-Slavery Conference in 1840 unwittingly sought Carlyle out, ignorant of his approval of slavery as a perfectly appropriate labor regime for those he considered inferior races. Elizabeth Cady Stanton preserved an admiration for Carlyle even after he threw the visiting abolitionists out of his house. In the late 1860s, when abolitionists were splitting over the enfranchisement of poor black men (before educated white women got the vote), Stanton turned into a mean-spirited, Saxon chauvinist more in line with Carlyle’s thought. She happily quoted Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus to the detriment of people she considered inherently inferior.18

  One notion guiding both Carlyle and Emerson, and supposedly liberal Americans like Stanton, was their heroic figuration of what they termed the Saxon race. Many other Americans—including Thomas Jefferson, the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of the most popular nineteenth-century American women’s magazine—proclaimed themselves Saxons.19* Most of these just briefly and easily looked back to “our Saxon ancestors,” before moving on, but Emerson dedicated an entire book to the subject, as we shall see. Cobbled together as race history, it drew on the eighth-century English historian Bede, Norse mythology, and many prevailing vers
ions of English history, notably the (male) historian-bookseller Sharon Turner’s wildly popular The History of the Anglo-Saxons, from Their First Appearance above the Elbe, to the Death of Egbert, originally published in 1799 and in its seventh edition in 1852. Emerson owned a copy of the seventh edition and eagerly absorbed its Saxon chauvinism. Digging deep into Old Norse literature, Turner lumps Saxons and Norse together to come up with a list of undying “traits” of the English race. He proclaims liberty the first and foremost of these traits, which he believes persisted from the fifth-century Saxon/Norse conquest and had remained valid ever since. Like Thomas Jefferson, Turner contrasts the Anglo-Saxon tradition of liberty with the Norman inclination toward tyranny. However, Turner’s concept of a Norman “graft” onto England’s original Anglo-Saxon “stock” disagrees with Jefferson’s idea of permanently, racially pure Anglo-Saxons.20

  Carlyle, who imagined himself a representative of Britain’s Norse heritage, infected his followers, including Emerson, with “we Saxon” jargon. Even the cosmopolitan Margaret Fuller, a foremost American interpreter of German romanticism, fell under the spell. On meeting Carlyle in London in 1846, Fuller portrays him admiringly, just the way he liked to be seen: “Carlyle, indeed, is arrogant and overbearing, but in his arrogance there is no littleness, no self-love: it is the heroic arrogance of some old Scandinavian conqueror—it is his nature and the untamable impulse that has given him power to crush the dragons…. [Y]ou like him heartily, and like to see him the powerful smith, the Siegfried, melting all the old iron in his furnace.”21

  This Teutonic/Saxon race chauvinism increased in Carlyle and Emerson as they aged, but far more so in Carlyle. His identification with his Saxons as Germans seemed boundless, as he completely embraced German nationalism and Teutonic race chauvinism along the lines of Charles Villers and romantics like the two Schlegels, de Staël’s friends.22 As early as 1820, in his twenty-fifth year, Carlyle was already admiring German writers for the “muscle in their frames.”23 A decade later, he was delivering popular lectures on German themes. One of several 1837 lectures was entitled “On the Teutonic People, the German Language, the Northern Immigration, and the Nibelungen Lied,” the pagan German epic that later inspired Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle. It may seem odd to readers today, but when Carlyle spoke of “the German people,” he was including much of the population of Britain. In any case, Carlyle came to sound a lot like the willfully excerpted version of Germania by the Roman author Tacitus, which was then beginning to circulate among German nationalists. Alert to the values of his time, Carlyle sexes his German nationalism masculine.