The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  * Benjamin Roberts, leader of the struggle against segregation in Boston schools, was Hosea Easton’s nephew and James Easton’s grandson. Paul Cuffee, the prosperous Afro-Indian seafaring merchant from New Bedford, married Mary Easton, one of James Easton’s daughters

  * Speaking of “our German ancestors,” the views of Tacitus, and “Germanic institutions,” in France, Tocqueville echoes the views of his protégé Gobineau. This idea of two disparate French races is usually ascribed to the class-minded, extreme hereditarian historian Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658–1722). Born in Normandy (and, therefore, by some accounts a descendant of the Vikings), Boulainvilliers was “an aristocrat of the most pronounced type” according to the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. He saw the aristocracy as the descendants of Franks from Germany and the peasants the descendants of mongrel Gauls and Romans.

  * Early on, Tocqueville quickly mentions the pernicious influence of slavery in the United States: idleness, ignorance, pride, poverty, and indulgence, the weaknesses of white southerners, then moves on to the Americans he sees as typical Americans: New Englanders.

  * Margaret Kohn notes that many scholars either remain silent on Tocqueville’s commentary regarding slavery and race or criticize him for evasion. Tocqueville’s own strategies corroborate the latter charge. The first and more famous volume of Democracy in America leads off with equality and relegates the discussion of three American races to the end of the book. Tocqueville admits that slavery and southern society belie his generalizations about the United States in footnotes and asides, though in his text he faults the South for sluggishness and laziness. He refers his readers to Beaumont’s work rather than integrating the multiracial theme into his analysis. Thomas Bender’s fond introduction to Democracy in America concedes Tocqueville’s avoidance of the fact of internal conflict in the United States and agrees with others who see Tocqueville as a prominent source for consensus thinkers such as Marvin Meyers and Louis Hartz.

  * Beaumont does not use the word “miscegenation,” coined only in 1864.

  * Chartists had submitted the first People’s Charter petition to the House of Commons in 1839, an action that Thomas Carlyle, moving away from his earlier sympathy with working people, answered with an influential pamphlet, “Chartism,” that expressed doubt that the needed reforms would ever be enacted. The second People’s Charter, bearing three million signatures, was submitted in 1842. Subsequent confrontation with police had led to twenty-four deaths. The House of Commons rejected all three petitions. By the 1840s Carlyle was expressing downright contempt for democracy.

  * Carl Schurz (1829–1906), a Union Army general during the Civil War and U.S. secretary of the interior, was the first German American to serve in the U.S. Senate. Henry Villard (1835–1900), born Ferdinand Heinrich Gustav Hilgard, married Helen Garrison, the daughter of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Their son Oswald Garrison Villard became a leading liberal journalist (publisher of the Nation) in the early twentieth century.

  * Today the Web offers a profusion of updated Paddy jokes, such as this one featuring the American golfer Tiger Woods:

  Taking a wee break from the golf circuit, Tiger Woods drives his new BMW into an Irish gas station. An attendant greets him in typical Irish manner, unaware who the golf pro is, “Top o’ the morning to ya.”

  As Tiger gets out of the car, two tees fall out of his pocket. “So what are those things, my son?” asks the attendant.

  “They’re called tees,” replied Tiger.

  “And what would ya be using ’em for, now?” inquired the Irishman.

  “Well, they’re for resting my balls on when I drive,” replies Tiger.

  “Aw, Jaysus, Mary an’ Joseph!” exclaimed the Irish attendant. “Those fellas working for BMW think of everything!”

  * The long history of Anglo-Saxon denigration of the Celtic Irish race inspired pro-Celtic nationalists to turn the cultural tables. The Scots, unlike the Irish, had not lacked apologists. In the 1760s the Scottish poet James MacPherson (1736–96) published the Poems of Ossian, which he claimed to be the work of Ossian, a third-century Celtic bard. MacPherson professed to have discovered and translated this ancient work, but when Samuel Johnson challenged its authenticity, MacPherson could not produce his originals. Poems of Ossian is now considered one of British literature’s greatest frauds. Robert Burns (1759–96), in contrast, remains Scotland’s national poet. Burns published Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in 1786, the first of a spate of well-loved and enduring works in dialect. Although Walter Scott (1771–1832) is now better known for the Saxon-Norman racial thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of his 1819 novel Ivanhoe, his publishing career began in 1802–03 with a collection of ballads, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and carried on with a series of novels and poems set in Scotland.

  * By giving her name to the Scots, Scota endowed the people of Scotland with an African origin.

  * Under the title “Amita” (“Friend”), Ralph Waldo Emerson gave an appreciation of his aunt to the Women’s Club of Boston in 1869.

  * Friedrich von Schlegel had studied Sanskrit in Paris and in 1808 published a book on Indian languages and knowledge: Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians). Emerson also shared this fascination with Indian language and philosophy with an Oxford scholar of Aryan, Max Müller, with whom he carried on an epistolary friendship for decades before meeting in person in 1873.

  † Henry Hedge, an original transcendentalist and longtime Emerson familiar, had also studied in Germany.

  * Between these two, Emerson’s American Scholar (1837) declares American intellectual independence from British models. American intellectual independence was not entirely complete, for in transcendentalism Germans replace the discarded British. Even the name “transcendentalism” came, via de Staël’s On Germany, from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s notion of “transcendental reality” in the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781 and 1787).

  † Ecclefechan lies midway between Lockerbie (where Pan Am flight 103 went down in 1988, killing 270 people) and Gretna Green, on the border between Scotland and England, well south of Glasgow.

  * Given Carlyle’s negative view of the Irish, he would not have appreciated Irish admiration and found American applause all the more precious.

  * A reviewer in the Southern Literary Messenger found Emerson’s style “affectedly, studiously, and elaborately involved and obscure.” Emerson’s observations were not “‘apples of gold set in pictures of silver,’ but rather like pearl embedded in a mudhole….”

  * Jefferson’s fellow Virginian Thomas Paine, did not agree that most Americans’ ancestors were Saxons. In Common Sense Paine concluded that “not one third of the inhabitants [of America] are of English descent.”

  * After his trip to France in 1848, Emerson admitted that the French had some masculinity. But throughout his life his basic inclination was Francophobic.

  * The whole sentence reads, “If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of war and wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts.”

  † Emerson mentions Tacitus at least four times in English Traits, turning his prose toward themes of German nationalism.

  * In 1858 Carlyle published his last great work, a six-volume biography of Frederick the Great, king of Prussia from 1740 to 1786. Celebrating Teutons, Germans, and Prussians to the point of unreadability, this rambling, battle-obsessed history identified more thoroughly with Germanic militarism than Emerson could stomach.

  * The Heimskringla, or Chronicle of the Kings of Norway. Tr. from the Icelandic of Snorro Sturleson, with a Preliminary Dissertation, by S. Laing had been published in London in 1844, one of the many books Emerson bought on his 1847 visit.

  * Emerson’s often repeated notion that races could exhaust themselves enjoyed currency well into the twentieth century
and reappears as the possibility of “unspent” races in a 1923 essay by the cultural pluralist Horace S. Kallen.

  * Emerson read Goethe’s essay on Winckelmann in 1850.

  * Popular interpretation, as phrased in 1785 by the poet William Cowper in “The Task,” followed the broader rather than the actual, narrow decision based on habeas corpus:

  Slaves cannot breathe in England, if their lungs

  Receive our air, that moment they are free[.]

  They touch our country, and their shackles fall.

  Cowper was protesting the existence of slavery in general (“I would not have a slave to till my ground”) and in the British empire in particular. Cowper wrote five other antislavery poems, including “The Negro’s Complaint” (1788).

  * By 1854 Emerson was the most famous of American writers, having been reviewed an astounding 644 times. Despite a temporary dip in his standing when his sunny liberalism lost its cachet in the 1960s and 1970s, he still dominates his century. After that bout of belittlement as a mere derivative thinker, Emerson bounced back, never having lost his status as a canonical author. The Princeton University Library holds 651 imprints with “Ralph Waldo Emerson” in their titles, including twelve volumes of Houghton Mifflin’s 1903–04 Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harvard University Press’s seven volumes (as of 2008) of the Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, sixteen volumes of Emerson’s Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, and innumerable volumes of Emerson poems, sermons, essays, and correspondence.

  * The embodiment of nationalist moderation, Emerson would not go so far as to advocate votes for either white women or black people of any sex.

  * The actual originator of the American school was a Philadelphia medical doctor and admirer of phrenology named Charles Caldwell, who critically reviewed Samuel Stanhope Smith’s Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species in 1811. Caldwell directly inspired Samuel George Morton.

  † Morton and his American admirers saw him as Blumenbach’s successor, even as Blumenbach’s superior.

  * The Mismeasure of Man (1996), Stephen Jay Gould’s classic study of physical anthropology and intelligence testing, deems Morton’s cranial measurements badly flawed. More recently, however, the Michigan anthropologist C. Loring Brace, in “Race” Is a Four-Letter Word: The Genesis of the Concept, has contested Gould’s findings and vindicated Morton’s measurements, but not his overall findings. Brace does not support Morton’s conclusions regarding relative racial intelligence as revealed in cranial measurements. But he respects Morton’s methodology, ascribing the flaws to Gould.

  * Morton and his followers departed from the prevailing orthodoxy of James Cowles Prichard in The Natural History of Man: Comprising Inquiries into the Modifying Influence of Physical and Moral Agencies on the Different Tribes of the Human Family (1848). Prichard classified North Africans, including Egyptians, as people of African origin. Prichard, whom Arthur de Gobineau also pilloried (consistently misspelling Prichard’s name), insisted on the single creation of mankind, with a subsequent elaboration of separate tribes. Prichard was the mid-nineteenth-century’s monogenist par excellence.

  * Pennsylvania emancipated the enslaved in 1780, but the law allowed the indenturing of children until they were at least twenty-eight years old. Indentures could be bought and sold in the open market.

  † While anthropologists differed on the meaning of various skull measurements, their confidence that all these measurements meant something seems not to have wavered. One of them, Louis-Pierre Gratiolet, designated three human races according to the part of the brain their physiognomy expressed: frontal, parietal, and occipital.

  ‡ Josiah Nott studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where Samuel Morton taught in the years 1839–43, but he graduated in 1827, before Morton joined the faculty.

  * Nott’s most persistent opponent in the monogenesis/polygenesis dispute was a New Yorker turned South Carolinian, the Reverend John Bachman, minister of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Charleston. Bachman, who had an 1848 Ph.D. from the University of Berlin, began criticizing Nott in 1849.

  † Nott disregarded the way Gobineau ended his sentence: “the inequality of the races from whose fusion a people is formed is enough to explain the whole course of its destiny.” The American was not about racial fusion.

  * After working for the Mobile Register, Hotze served briefly in Mobile’s Confederate militia and as a commercial and secret agent for the Confederacy in London, where he published a Confederate newspaper through the duration of the war. One of Hotze’s contacts among British people sympathetic to the Confederacy was Dr. James Hunt, a disciple of Robert Knox, who had founded the Anthropological Society to advance Negrophobic anthropology.

  † In 1855, when Nott and Hotze were preparing their version of Gobineau’s Essai, Tocqueville was proposing Gobineau to the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, to which Tocqueville and his traveling companion Beaumont had been elected in the 1830s. Tocqueville disliked Gobineau’s Essai, but was fond of Gobineau personally.

  * The theme of Aryan beauty runs through Gobineau’s thousand pages of text. Gobineau and Emerson seem to have been echoing each other in their paeans to the blond barbarian Leviathan with his red and white complexion, broad shoulders, great height, and utter fearlessness and their conviction that Anglo-Saxons stemmed from Scandinavia and conserved the vital Aryan essence.

  † An unsigned review in Putnam’s Monthly of January 1856 discusses Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races with care. The reviewer regrets Holtz’s (and Nott’s) emasculation of Gobineau’s original, while disagreeing, as had Tocqueville, with Gobineau’s fatalism. The reviewer concludes that the translation is worth reading.

  Gobineau’s great vogue came with the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Teutomania of German nationalists like Richard Wagner, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Madison Grant. When a new English translation of Gobineau was published in 1915, it, rather than Nott’s, found a growing and appreciative audience of nationalists and eugenicists. No English editions of Gobineau’s Essai appeared between 1856 and 1915.

  * George Gliddon had come to the United States for the second time on a similar quest, but he never found steady work and became one of Nott’s permanent dependents.

  * In 1868 the Democratic nominating convention met in New York City. Seymour emerged as the party’s presidential candidate but lost to Ulysses S. Grant in the general election.

  † In 1892 New York City razed the Five Points slum for the creation of Columbus Park at Mulberry and Bayard Streets in lower Manhattan. This area, a magnet for successive waves of immigrants, is currently known as New York’s Chinatown, previously Little Italy, which remains only a tourist destination.

  * Among Lodge’s rare dissenters stood John Hammond Moore, a historian from Mississippi, who objected that Lodge’s sloppy methodology deprived the South of standing, which it surely did.

  * “The race” would seem to indicate the human race, but its meanings in their contexts often pointed toward only middle-and upper-class whites of English descent. Walker’s demographic anxieties pertained merely to white Americans; he did not include others as Americans. Describing the American population of 1790—when Indians still lived in the Northeast and one-fifth of the enumerated population descended from Africans—Walker said that “(leaving the Africans out of account) it was all of European stock.” The terminology of “stock”—as in better or poorer—evaluated people as creatures whose whole value emerged in metaphors of animal breeding.

  * Walker’s theory of a demographic driving-out survived until its refutation in 1945 in W. Lloyd Warner and Leo Srole’s The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups.

  * Neither of Ripley’s parents, however, bore the name Zebina.

  * Ripley told the New York Times reporter that he had needed the extra money for his children’s education.

  † In his preface Ripley says that his wife performed such “a good
ly share” of the book’s preparation that he wanted to include her name on the title page. This did not occur.

  * Two other seminal racist works also appeared in 1899: Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (translated as Foundations of the Nineteenth Century), and Georges Vacher de Lapouge, L’Aryen: Son rôle social, translated into German in 1939, but not English. A now forgotten, then aspiring American racist scholar, Carlos C. Closson, translated Lapouge’s shorter work on the Aryan.