The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  His Germans are “the only genuine European people, unmixed with strangers. They have in fact never been subdued; and considering the great, open, and fertile country which they inhabit, this fact at once demonstrates the masculine and indomitable character of the race. They have not only not been subdued, but been themselves by far the greatest conquerors in the world.”24 Those themes of masculinity and race purity would soon reappear in Emerson, with masculinity of far greater consequence. On the matter of racial purity Emerson would waver.

  But neither of them had a good word to say for France or the French people—an “Ape-population,” as Carlyle put it. France had turned revolutionary in 1789 and again in 1848, and Carlyle detested anything hinting of democracy. Such broad condemnation raised problems. What was one to make of the virile French Norman conquerors? Carlyle finessed that contradiction by pronouncing Normans to be Norsemen who had merely learned to speak French; obviously, for him, the change of language had not altered their blood, their basic nature, or their manly might. The Norman conquest had clearly benefited Britain, “entering with a strong man [William the Conqueror]…an immense volunteer police force…united, disciplined, feudally regimented, ready for action; strong Teutonic men.”25 All of this went quite a bit over the top, but American readers loved it. Carlyle might have trashed the French more lustily, but Emerson did his bit.

  An 1835 lecture shows just how far Emerson would go. “Permanent Traits of the English National Genius” begins by connecting Americans to the English: “The inhabitants of the United States, especially of the Northern portion, are descended from the people of England and have inherited the traits of their national character.” As for the French, their early enemies may be trusted when they hold, “‘It is common with the Franks to break their faith and laugh at it. The race of Franks is faithless.’…An union of laughter and crime, of deceit and politeness is the unfavorable picture of the French character as drawn by the English and Germans, and even by the French themselves.”26 The unmanly vices of frivolity, corruption, and lack of practical know-how all afflicted the French. How else to view a people who invented the ruffle, while it took the English to invent the shirt?27* For manly practicality, look to the “English race.” For the childish, “singing and dancing nations,” look south.28 That north/south dichotomy would prove a durable theory, one Emerson trumpeted and his followers echoed, including his younger and rather priggish English admirer Matthew Arnold, ostensible defender of the beleaguered Celts.

  Emerson and Carlyle outlined a transatlantic realm of Saxondom also taken up by Arnold, among many others. In his first letter after Emerson’s 1833 visit, Carlyle wrote, “Let me repeat once more what I believe is already dimly the sentiment of all Englishmen, Cisoceanic and Transoceanic, that we and you are not two countries, and cannot for the life of us be; but only two parishes of one country, with such wholesome parish hospitalities, and dirty temporary parish feuds, as we see; both of which brave parishes Vivant! vivant!”29 In the late 1830s Emerson was urging Carlyle to visit the United States, perhaps even to settle permanently: “Come, & make a home with me,” Emerson wrote.30 What a joy it would be to merge the intellects of Saxondom in their own two persons!

  This rhetoric of bonding seemed to have no ceiling. In 1841 Carlyle, following Goethe’s infatuation with the ancient Greeks, wrote, “By and by we shall visibly be, what I always say we virtually are, members of neighboring Parishes; paying continual visits to one another. What is to hinder huge London from being to universal Saxondom what small Mycale was to the Tribes of Greece…. A meeting of All the English ought to be as good as one of All the Ionians….”31 And Emerson agreed. Enjoying a reputation for genius in Britain as well as the United States by 1853–55, he repeated a lecture entitled “The Anglo-American.” He might well have been speaking autobiographically in his comments on the “godly & grand British race”: “it is right to esteem without regard to geography this industrious liberty-loving Saxon wherever he works,—the Saxon, the colossus who bestrides the narrow Atlantic….”32 But in all this mutual admiration, a rift would soon appear.

  Emerson saw himself as a New Englander, virtually as an Englishman, and therefore as a “Saxon.” “We Saxons” peppered his lectures, essays, and journals. In his classic 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” Emerson exhorts his readers to wake up the “courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts,” to realize that New Englanders are the final product of a process of distillation that had earlier turned Norsemen into Englishmen over the course of a millennium.* Later on, he would portray New Englanders as even more English than the English, as “double distilled English.”

  Carlyle would not go that far. For all his Germanicism, Carlyle saw London as the natural capital of Saxondom for the present and foreseeable future. Perhaps later—probably much later—the capital might move west: “After centuries, if Boston, if New York, have become the most convenient ‘All-Saxondom,’ we will right cheerfully go thither to hold such festival….”33 Before long, this boil would fester and burst, for Emerson’s timetable sprang from a conviction that England was already practically worn out from excessive commercialism, labor troubles, and luxury. The Saxons on Americans’ side of the ocean, woodsmen who reminded Emerson of the Germans of Tacitus, would inherit the mantle of Saxon leadership sooner rather than later.†

  Emerson did not visit Britain between 1833 and 1847. When he later did, he found Saxon identity weakening as a glue of friendship. Britain was enduring the economic hard times and suffering that would inspire Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times (1854). The ever grumpy Carlyle grew more authoritarian, to the point that in 1848 he complained about Emerson’s equanimity: Emerson was “content with everything” and becoming “a little wearisome” with his “pleasant moonshiny lectures.” Emerson fired back, reporting that Carlyle “sits in his four-story house and sneers.”34 Basically, the friendship was over, but on one issue Emerson and Carlyle could still agree. Both looked askance at the Irish.

  Carlyle termed the Irish “Human swinery,” playing on the commonplace analogy between Irish people and pigs. The Irish were believed to live with their pigs, and pigs were considered quintessentially Irish, as in the saying, “as Irish as Paddy’s pig.” Over in Concord, Massachusetts, where Irish laborers worked in mud and lived in shanties, Emerson saw no reason to dispute this libel. One of his rare comments on the districts of the poor, where he spent very little time, reveals both prejudice and naïveté: “In Irish districts, men deteriorated in size and shape, the nose sunk, the gums were exposed, with diminished brain and brutal form.”35 Like Carlyle in Chartism (1840), Emerson skirts the issue of whether race alone made the Irish ugly. On such an easy topic, the two found agreement.*

  Then came the American Civil War. Emerson, no radical abolitionist, nonetheless opposed American slavery, particularly after the toughening of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 and John Brown’s raid on the Harpers Ferry, Virginia, federal arsenal in 1859. He also supported the Union during the war itself. Emerson did make a third and last trip to Europe, in 1872–73, only to find that he and Carlyle, both impaired by age, could no longer manage a meeting of the minds. Carlyle voiced a growing antipathy toward just about everybody. Gone were his youthful hints of sympathy for ordinary folk, an inclination always vaguely abstract. After his bitter pronouncements on what he called the “Nigger question” in 1850, he expressed no sympathy whatever with the poor, whether recently emancipated in the Western Hemisphere or despised and impoverished in Ireland and Britain.

  But while their halcyon days may have gone, their influence lived on. Tutored in German race theory reaching back to Winckelmann and Goethe, each had become his country’s national voice, eloquently equating Americans with Britons and Britons with Saxons. The Anglo-Saxon myth of racial superiority now permeated concepts of race in the United States and virtually throughout the English-speaking world. To be American was to be Saxon.

  11

  ENGLISH TRAITS

  In the mid-
1850s, Emerson cast about for new material and, at the same time, felt a need to get notes from his two European trips into print. Journal entries from those visits in 1833 and 1847–48 contained an abundance of raw material for a book on England and the Saxon race. But to buttress his arguments he read widely in history and science dealing with the race of men (and he did mean men) he considered permanent masters of the earth. Like all of Emerson’s books, English Traits, which appeared in 1856, collects lectures delivered to various audiences over the course of a decade. Part travelogue, part autobiography, part historical ethnography, English Traits heightened his fame and gained appreciation as his wittiest book. Its popularity endured well into the twentieth century, when its racial theories began to fall into disrepute.1

  Ideas about Saxons and the English people had long percolated in the United States. In his 1835 lecture “Permanent Traits of the English National Genius,” Emerson called attention to the similarities in Americans’ and Englishmen’s appearance—the red and white complexion, blond hair, blue eyes, and tall stature—and, without doubt, ferocious manhood, all admirable traits quite unlike those of small and dark Celts, obviously (for Emerson) Asiatic in origin. These ideas reappeared in his 1843 lecture “Genius of the Anglo-Saxon Race” and in 1852–53 in “Traits and Genius of the Anglo-Saxon Race” and “The Anglo-American.”2

  These oft-repeated lectures made a ready audience for English Traits. Within three months of publication, 24,000 copies were in print in the United States and Great Britain, and the book was widely and positively reviewed.3 Despite its blatant English/Saxon chauvinism—or perhaps because of it—English Traits attracted readers of various political persuasions and racial backgrounds. Charlotte Forten, for instance, the daughter of wealthy black Philadelphians and, at nineteen, an abolitionist in her own right, championed the book. Forten, who was living in Massachusetts at the time, bought the book and finished reading it within three weeks of its publication. In February 1857 Forten went to hear Emerson speak on the topic “Works and Days,” which she found enlightening and the person of Emerson intimidating. She liked it, she said, “very much. The author’s views of English character are far more liberal than those of American travelers generally. He evidently appreciates dear old England; and, loving her as I do, I like his book and thank him for it with all my heart.”4 The antislavery U.S. senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner, joined Forten and many other Americans in rampant Anglophilia. He pronounced himself attracted by “famous London town,” which he considered downright “bewitching.”5 However clear-minded they might have been about the shortcomings of American society, New Englanders went gaga over the English.

  Emerson himself cared little for London society, but he was obsessed with Saxon violence and manly beauty, both of which qualities he lacked. He was, in fact, a tall and skinny man, who, like his friend Thomas Carlyle, suffered from various nervous and bodily ailments throughout his life. As a house-bound intellectual when not lecturing before appreciative audiences, Emerson grew fascinated by the primeval virility of outdoor men of physical strength. Many others shared these anxieties, enough to make scenes of frontier violence staples of popular entertainment in Britain and the United States.6

  THE CORE chapter of English Traits, called “Race,” begins in measured tones. Emerson enumerates the three components of the English population: first the Celt, to whom he gives less than a paragraph; second, the German, also briefly noted; and third, the “Northmen.” The balance of the chapter revels in ancient Viking history, dominated by traits of personal beauty and bloodthirstiness.

  In the remainder of English Traits, race becomes ever more defined. The English race may be mixed, but, even so, racial “stock” determines national destiny: the “early history of each tribe show[s] the permanent bias…. In [King] Alfred [the Great of Wessex], in the Northmen, one may read the genius of the English society….” Emerson’s use of breeding terminology like “stock,” anticipates the vocabulary of twentieth-century eugenics.

  The “Race” chapter expresses two thoughts rooted in concerns Emerson shared with masses of Americans relishing his themes—two thoughts expressed as content and form. Brutality emerges as the chapter’s prized quality, with manly beauty its outward appearance. As early as 1835 Emerson had praised the men he alternately termed Danes, Norsemen, Saxons, and Anglo-Saxons for their “beastly ferocity.”7 He amplifies this theme in English Traits. Bodily strength, vigor, manliness, and energy emerge as natural outgrowths of early Saxon bloodthirstiness, presented lovingly. Nature created Saxons/Norsemen as “a rude race, all masculine, with brutish strength,” endowing their English descendants, in turn, with an “excess of virility.”8

  Homicidal history, synonymous to Emerson with gorgeous male energy, comes to life in his two quintessential “Norsemen,” the brothers Horsa and Hengist, legendary founders of Saxon England. Recall that Thomas Jefferson had considered honoring them on the Great Seal of the new United States of America. According to legend, the mid-fifth-century British warlord Vortigern invited the brothers Horsa and Hengist into what is now Kent, in the southeastern tip of England, to wrest the island from its Celtic population and their Roman overlords. A century later the monk Gildas described the tribes of Horsa and Hengist as “vile unspeakable Saxons, hated of God and man alike,” but their reputation rose considerably with the passage of centuries.9

  Today Horsa and Hengist are considered Jutes from what is now Denmark, but tradition claims them as founders of the Anglo-Saxon nation that King Alfred raised to greatness in the late ninth century. Emerson ignored particularities of geography and lumped together Norsemen, Jutes, and Saxons as marvelous Scandinavian pirates, “a rude race, all masculine, with brutish strength…. Let buffalo gore buffalo, and the pasture to the strongest!”10 Staying over the top, Emerson reveled in the Saxon/Jute/Norse brutality he had discovered in Samuel Laing’s translation of Heimskringla, or Chronicle of the Kings of Norway.* Though the term “Norsemen” usually refers to people of the far north—that is, to Dark Age Scandinavians in general—Emerson, by drawing on the Heimskringla, would seem finally to focus on Norway as the homeland in his theory. Actual German Saxons, in fact, hardly appear in English Traits, because, with the exception of Goethe, Emerson questions Germans’ fitness to serve as models of any sort. Along with “the Asiatic races,” he said back in 1835, Germans lack the racial constitution for political greatness, sharing as they do Asians’ political impotence out of “a defect of will.”11 Norsemen supply the bonny figure of the Englishman American’s ancestor.

  Scandinavia might work as the ancestral home of northern whiteness, but Scandinavia of the 1850s created a dilemma: it was backward and really quite poor—a little nothing beside the British behemoth. How could Emerson reconcile that reality with his need for Scandinavian racial (hence permanent) brilliance? If the Norsemen endowed Britain with all its “Saxon” greatness, how to explain the relative obscurity of contemporary Scandinavia? Why had not Norwegians and Danes launched the industrial revolution, grown rich on worldwide commerce, and colonized the globe?

  Here Emerson resorts to a favorite metaphor: the fruit tree. Scandinavia, he surmises, lost its best men during the Dark Ages—lost them to England and never recovered: “The continued draught of the best men in Norway, Sweden and Denmark to their piratical expeditions exhausted those countries, like a tree which bears much fruit when young, and these have been second-rate powers ever since. The power of the race migrated and left Norway permanently exhausted.”12* It is a lame theory, and Emerson does not lean on it heavily. For his purposes, recent history of his Norsemen in Scandinavia need not loom large. The early days sufficed.

  Consider his affection for obscure Norwegian kings and princes: “These Norsemen are excellent persons in the main,” says Emerson, “with good sense, steadiness, wise speech, and prompt action. But they have a singular turn for homicide.” Then, in a spirit of great good fun, he goes on to detail their amusements:

  their ch
ief end of man is to murder, or to be murdered; oar, scythes, harpoons, crowbars, peatknives, and hayforks, are tools valued by them all the more for their charming aptitude for assassinations. A pair of kings, after dinner, will divert themselves by thrusting each his sword through the other’s body, as did Yngve and Alf. Another pair ride out on a morning for a frolic, and, finding no weapon near, will take the bits out of their horses’ mouths, and crush each other’s heads with them, as did Alric and Eric. The sight of a tent-cord or a cloak-string puts them on hanging somebody, a wife, or a husband, or, best of all, a king. If a farmer has so much as a hayfork, he sticks it into a King Dag. King Ingiald finds it vastly amusing to burn up half a dozen kings in a hall, after getting them drunk. Never was poor gentleman so surfeited with life, so furious to be rid of it, as the Northman. If he cannot pick any other quarrel, he will get himself comfortably gored by a bull’s horns, like Egil, or slain by a land-slide, like the agricultural King Onund.13