The third “I” was not an American development. Imperialism as a modern ideology arose in Europe and England, but it washed over our shores around 1890. The United States bought into it. Between 1887 and 1897, the United States annexed Hawai’i; the process for it to go from independent kingdom to U.S. territory took a full decade. Underlying the transition was the claim that white Americans would govern those “brown” people better than they could govern themselves. Then, after winning the Spanish American War in 1898, the following year the U.S. turned against its allies, the Filipinos, who had done most of the work of removing the Spanish from the Philippines. The McKinley administration used the same rationale: our military governor over the islands, William Howard Taft, said “our little brown brothers” would require at least half a century of white supervision before they would be capable of democracy. Democrats responded, “What about our little brown brothers in Mississippi? In Alabama?” McKinley had no cogent reply. The United States also dominated Puerto Rico, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and other Caribbean and Central American nations, always with the rationale that we, a white nation, could govern them better than they could govern themselves. Once more, if it is OK to dominate natives in other countries partly because they aren’t exactly white, why isn’t it OK to do the same to African Americans at home?
There were still other causes of the decline of Republican antiracism. During what some historians call the Gilded Age, some capitalists, mostly Republicans, amassed huge fortunes. Doing likewise became the dream of many Republicans, a goal that was hard to reconcile with the party’s former talk of social justice. This increasing stratification sapped America’s historic belief that “all men are created equal.” To justify the quest for wealth, a substitute ideology was created, Social Darwinism—the notion that the fittest rise to the top in society. It provided a potent rationale not only for class privilege but for racial superiority as well.
Once the fatal events of 1890 took place, whites across the country had to rationalize them. Again, cognitive dissonance played a key role. Americans, even as far from Mississippi as New England, had to explain to themselves that state’s removal of African Americans from effective citizenship. They could hardly say, “I am an American; I believe in freedom and democracy and equal rights for all,” since they had acquiesced in Mississippi’s action. So they had to say, “I believe in freedom and democracy and equal rights for all—except nonwhites.” They told themselves that African Americans—and Native Americans, too—just “weren’t ready” for equal rights. White Southerners knew best what to do, after all.
Thus, theories of racial inferiority again became important, as during slavery, to rationalize the discriminatory treatment of black people. Now these theories came with the imprimatur of science, “eugenics”—improving the human race by discouraging reproduction by undesirable groups. The leader of the eugenics movement, Madison Grant, wrote in The Passing of the Great Race in 1916, “[I]t has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes, and going to school and to church do not transform a Negro into a white man.”13 The fact that African Americans lagged in income and status owing to discrimination now provided reason to discriminate further.
STUDENTS CAN REVEAL THE NADIR THEMSELVES
Students can see the Nadir at work by counting the representation of African Americans in Congress from 1868, when the 15th amendment began to take effect, to 1890, and from then until 1940. They will find that the rather sturdy representation of the race who took their seats in, say, 1877, dwindled to a single person—George White of North Carolina—by 1900. White’s valediction to the House of Representatives, delivered January 29, 1901, provides a concise summary of the fair treatment that African Americans were not getting during the Nadir. Underlying the elimination of African Americans from Congress was their removal from voting. If their county has a substantial black population, students may be able to see what happened to black voting where they live, thus showing a local manifestation of a national trend.
Students can also research the “racial history” of the National Football League. They will learn that from its founding in 1920, its teams played in small Midwestern cities like Decatur and Rock Island, Illinois; Canton and Akron, Ohio; and Green Bay, Wisconsin. (Only Green Bay survives from this era.) They will also discover that African Americans played until 1933. As the Nadir continued to shut down opportunities for African Americans, whites found it hard to justify employing blacks when white athletes were out of work during the Great Depression. So for a dozen years, football joined baseball and became lily-white.
Leola Bergmann analyzed the treatment of African Americans in Iowa newspapers from 1865 to the end of the century. At first, she found that newspapers reported reasonably well about the organized activities and individual stories within the black community. Gradually, however, “as the emotions of the Civil War era cooled,” newspapers started doing terrible jobs. By the 1890s, almost every story about African Americans that saw print concerned crime. Even when Republican President Benjamin Harrison named a black Iowan ambassador to Liberia in 1890, not one Iowa newspaper reported it.14 Students can carry out similar content analyses of their local paper, the leading newspaper in their state, or a national source like the New York Times. Many newspapers are online and can be searched for words like “negro,” “black,” “colored,” and “nigger.” Students can also characterize each story as “positive” (+1), “neutral” (0), or “negative” (-1), and put this rating into a spreadsheet. Then it’s easy to calculate the total number of stories in each decade, compute the mean rating for each decade, and see if trends appear. A simple bar graph will clarify trends and help students become proficient at reading and understanding graphs and tables.
Students who can gain access to American histories published between 1866 and 1880 can compare their portrayal of the Civil War to that in books published later, between 1895 and 1940.15 Things to look for include why the South seceded, the role of black troops, whether Andrew Johnson is seen as a persecuted martyr or a bad president, and use of the terms “carpet bagger” and “scalawag.” They should also look to see if the Civil War came to be called the “War Between the States” as time passed. As the Nadir deepened, textbook expositions of Lincoln’s war aims may say less and less about ending slavery.
Another way students can see the Nadir is in this ad for Cream of Wheat depicting a five-year-old white boy whipping his elderly black babysitter. The man is not the boy’s uncle, of course. Rather, whites called older and more senior African Americans “uncle” and “aunt” or “auntie” as terms of quasi-respect during the Nadir; “Mister,” “sir,” or “ma’am” would imply they were fully human. In conjunction with the photo of Gordon, who had been whipped (p. 168), this illustration makes its point, especially when we consider that in 1914, Cream of Wheat thought it would convey a warm glow to most Americans, prompting them to buy their breakfast cereal.
The Nadir of race relations happened across the entire United States. Therefore, students can look for it almost everywhere, including in their own neighborhood. Within their county, African Americans may have held elective office before the Nadir, or after the Civil Rights Movement, but not between. Students can use the manuscript census for 1860 through 1930 to map where African Americans lived.16 Probably they will see increasing concentration. They can also compute D for their town over time.17 Students can also look for sundown towns in their area.18
Many Americans do not realize that formal racial segregation afflicted not just the South, but half of all states in the early 1950s. In addition to the eleven former Confederate states, Delaware; Maryland; West Virginia; the southern third of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois; Kentucky; Missouri; much of Kansas; Oklahoma; Arizona; and some communities in California kept African Americans out of white schools. Even farther north, many communities barred African Americans from swimming pools, theaters, parks, and other spaces used by the public. Private c
ompanies were often worse. Breweries in Milwaukee started to hire African Americans only in 1950. The city of Milwaukee did not employ a single black teacher until 1951. No major department store in that city hired a single African American as a full-time sales clerk until 1952. Across the North, most jobs in construction were reserved for whites until the 1970s.19 Student research can reveal what schools, pools, theaters, hotels, and other institutions in their community operated without regard to race, and which places barred African Americans (and sometimes Jews and others) during the Nadir. They can also learn which jobs were open and which were closed to African Americans.
DURING THE NADIR, WHITES BECAME WHITE
Before the Nadir, whites weren’t sure that the world contains three races of mankind. Often, they thought there were many more. The main building of the Library of Congress was built in 1897. Its embellishments included 33 “ethnological heads,” carved in stone, placed above its windows. They symbolize the 33 races of mankind, according to Otis Mason, who was curator of the Department of Ethnology at the Smithsonian at the time. Herbert Small wrote the Handbook of the New Library of Congress to coincide with the building’s dedication. Modified and retitled, it is still in print. He tells of the ethnological heads:
The list of the races … is as follows …: 1, Russian Slav; 2, Blonde European; 3, Brunette European; 4, Modern Greek; 5, Persian (Iranian); 6, Circassian; 7, Hindoo; 8, Hungarian (Magyar); 9, Semite, or Jew; 10, Arab (Bedouin); 11, Turk; 12, Modern Egyptian (Hamite); 13, Abyssinian [Ethiopian]; 14, Malay; 15, Polynesian; 16, Australian; 17, Negrito (from Indian Archipelago); 18, Zulu (Bantu); 19, Papuan (New Guinea); 20, Sudan Negro; 21, Akka (Dwarf African Negro); 22, Fuegian; 23, Botocudo (from South America); 24, Pueblo Indian (as the Zuñis of New Mexico); 25, Eskimo; 26, Plains Indian (Sioux, Cheyenne, Comanche); 27, Samoyete (Finnish inhabitant of Northern Russia [Lapp]); 28, Korean; 29, Japanese; 30, Ainu (from Northern Japan); 31, Burmese; 32, Tibetan; 33, Chinese.20
Small goes on to boast, “The series is unique in that it is the first instance of a comprehensive attempt to make ethnological science contribute to the architectural decoration of an important public building.” In the 1990s, old-timers at the Smithsonian claimed that the sculptors worked from real heads, pickled in brine, that still existed in barrels deep in the bowels of the National Museum of Natural History! Small implicitly confirms that tale:
The large collection of authentic, life-size models, chiefly of savage and barbarous peoples … is the most extensive in the country, and many of the heads on the Library keystones are taken directly from these.
Small concludes that, given the difficulty of working in granite, the result “is one of the most scientifically accurate series of racial models ever made.” Each head is intended to “exemplify all the average physical characteristics of his race.”21
The heads are presented in a sequence that embodies Social Darwinism. Eugenics rears its ugly head here, although some of the carved heads are in fact quite beautiful. Closest to Congress and nearest to the main entrance are the winners—the “highest” types, such as “Blonde European [of] the educated German type, dolichocephalic, or long headed,” followed by “Brunette European [of] the Roman type, brachycephalic, or broad-headed,” in Small’s words. On the right but still facing Congress are “Chinese” and “Japanese” and the like. Relegated to the back are the really bad races, the losers, “savage and barbarous peoples” such as “Australian,” “Negrito,” “Zulu,” “Papuan,” and “Akka (Dwarf African Negro).” However, some African Americans note that this allots black peoples the position of honor on the east, facing the rising sun.
Today people scoff at this entire enterprise. Egyptian race? Greek race? Nonsense! It seems obvious now that there are only three races of humankind.
What are the three races? Black, white, and “yellow,” of course, but somehow that last term sounds disrespectful. Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid? The last word sounds like slang for Down syndrome. There are other problems with this scheme as well. For example, what about Australian Aborigines? They are hardly “Negroes.” What about Native Americans? They are hardly “Mongolians.” What of Malays? Somalis and Ethiopians in northeastern Africa? Pygmies or Mbuti people in central Africa? Some of those last peoples, though classed “Negroid,” may be genetically closer to “Caucasians” or “Mongolians.” I’m getting confused!
Besides, the “Caucasian” group turns out to have been invented by two Germans, notably J. F. Blumenbach (1752–1840), who got his history and geography all wrong. He believed that Caucasians were the first and most beautiful race of mankind and originated in the Caucasus Mountains, between the Black and Caspian seas. Now we know that all humans originated in Africa. Nevertheless, his classification scheme not only lives on but strikes many people as somehow more scientific than using mere colors.
All “races of mankind,” whether 3 or 33, are social constructs, set up and agreed to by Western opinion leaders. The only defensible statement of biological race is this: We are all one race, the human race. Depending upon environmental conditions and the degree of isolation from others, after leaving the part of Africa where humans first originated, people started to grow more different from one another. Then, beginning around 200 BC, developments in transportation and the nation-state began to put people around the world back into contact with one another. It follows that no “racial” differences are qualitative. All are matters of degree. Besides, some differences among groups may not have conveyed any survival value but just happened to be linked genetically to differences that did. Other differences resulted from genetic drift, having neither positive nor negative implications. In sum, the racial hierarchy and categories that developed over the last 500 years are products of history, not biology.
Today we snicker at the last line under this bust of Christopher Columbus. We “know” Italians are not a race. Obviously this was not Italian Americans’ understanding in 1920, however, when they erected this bust at the Indiana State Capitol.
We must conclude that the notion of three races is hardly carved in stone. Our “modern” way of viewing the world, so far as race is concerned, is largely a product of the Nadir. Between 1890 and 1940, such immigrant groups as Greeks, Italians, and Slavs achieved reclassification as “white.” Irish Americans had attained this label somewhat earlier, as Noel Ignatiev explains in his wonderfully titled book, How the Irish Became White. Jews reached it a bit later, as Karen Brodkin tells in How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America.22 Armenians, Turks, Egyptians, and Arabs took just a little longer, but they, too, have now found room under the “white” umbrella (although reactions to the attacks of 9/11/2001 may be pushing Arabs back toward “other” status). Without these additions, “whites” would have been outnumbered long ago.
One way to increase the solidarity of an in-group is by creating an out-group, an “other.” Jews and Rom people played this role during the Third Reich. African Americans (and in the West, Native Americans and Asian Americans) played this role in the U.S. This process is shown in operation in Granite City, Illinois. Between 1900 and 1970, this St. Louis suburb grew from 3,122 to 40,440, owing to skyrocketing employment. Meanwhile, its black population fell from 154 to 6. Between 1900 and 1910, hundreds of new immigrants, mostly from Macedonia and Bulgaria, poured into Granite City. “Poorly paid, they lived in pathetic squalor, ignorant of American institutions,” according to a 1971 history of the community. Nevertheless, Granite City at least tolerated and sometimes even welcomed these white ethnic group members. They may not have been American, but at least they were not black. Meanwhile, the town was busy expelling its African Americans. The Macedonians had started at the bottom, in competition with African Americans, but when Anglo, Irish, Polish, Greek, Italian, and now Macedonian and Bulgarian Americans joined to expel Granite City’s African Americans around 1903, “whites” were now united. By 1971, Macedonian and Bulgarian American children were fully accepted. African Americans
were still totally excluded. Granite City was still a sundown town.23
Today, “white America” seems to be incorporating Latinos and Asian Americans. Increasingly, Japanese and Korean Americans marry outside their group, mostly marrying whites. Most sundown towns have long admitted Asian and Latino Americans. In 1960, Dearborn, a sundown suburb of Detroit, called Arabs from the Middle East “white population born in Asia” and Mexicans “white population born in Mexico” in official documents, thus remaining “all white” as a city. Sundown town policy now seems to be: all groups are fine except African Americans.24
Students can uncover for themselves the relative position of various ethnic and racial groups in their community over time. Tombstones, the manuscript census, city directories, and school yearbooks supply useful data sources. Often smaller towns have only one cemetery. Since tombstones record burial dates and names often reveal ethnic group membership, students can map the location of an ethnic group’s dead over time. They may be absent entirely, early in the Nadir; then graves appear at one edge; more recent burials occur throughout the cemetery. Similarly, students can use the manuscript census to map where ethnic groups lived from 1900 through 1930. City directories or old phone directories can supply this information for later years. Again, students may find considerable residential concentration at first, followed by dispersal. Students can visit that part of town and see how it looks today. They can map other groups, such as African Americans, over time, and see if similar dispersal took place. Students can also assess the state of civil rights in their communities today, decades after the Civil Rights Movement began to undo the effects of the Nadir. Have schools resegregated owing to white flight, withdrawal to private schools, or tracking within schools? Do governments and private employers hire without regard to race, or do whites still run things while blacks and Latinos clean up?
Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History Page 28