The Undivided Past (30 page)

A further unresolved issue was the relationship between these recently discerned racial identities and the simultaneous rise of national identities: were they mutually reinforcing or mutually exclusive? There were those like
Robert Knox who argued that Europe had always been a racial melting pot, that the races were hopelessly mixed up, and that they would always remain so, resulting in the sort of antagonisms that had erupted across the continent during 1848. From this perspective, aligning national identities with racial identities was unrealistic and impossible. Alternatively, there were those like
Johann Gottfried von Herder who combined the “scientific” view of race with a mystical belief in the unchanging spirit of the people (“Volksgeist”), expressed in their culture, history, and language, in the hope that there could be established a pure, unsullied collective “volkish” identity. Such an outcome was especially attractive to those who believed in the Aryan race, whose origins were traced back by philologists, via ancient
Greece and Rome, to
India; and the superiority of the
Aryans over all other races would be proclaimed by (among others)
Richard Wagner, offering powerful validation to those who believed that the great task of nineteenth-century German statesmanship must be to align the racial identity of the
“Volk” with an appropriate unit of political jurisdiction, bringing together blood and soil, race and nation.
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There was also disagreement as to whether races were becoming more or less pure, stronger or weaker, were progressing or degenerating.
³⁹
Gobineau feared that the “unnatural” mixing
and miscegenation meant the weaker races (with darker skins and smaller brains) were undermining and would eventually overwhelm the stronger races (with white skins and bigger brains), thereby subverting and eventually overturning what ought to be the permanent racial hierarchy.
⁴⁰
But this gloomy interpretation was challenged by a more optimistic view of racial prospects, derived from the work of
Charles Darwin, especially his
Origin of Species
(1859) and
Descent of Man
(1871). Darwin did not believe in rigid racial identities, but thought they “graduate into each other,” which meant it was “hardly possible to discover clear distinctive characters between them.” Yet his argument that evolution was based on the survival of the fittest was taken by some to mean that life was a struggle for existence among races, and that those with greater energy and intelligence would triumph by reason of natural selection over those lesser breeds who were enervated and stupid and thus doomed to extinction. From this so-called
social Darwinist perspective, races must be getting stronger not weaker, and the purpose of statecraft should be to facilitate this process of
human evolution by intervening in the preordained conflicts between the races, thereby ensuring the eventual triumph of the superior races and the necessary subjugation (even the elimination) of the lesser ones.
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Since “scientific racism” was riven by inaccuracies and internal contradictions, this lent support to the alternative, traditionalist view: namely, that the attempt to undermine the traditional biblical teachings of
monogenesis and common humanity by dividing and ordering people on the basis of their skin color was not only intellectually flawed but also morally wicked. Such was the opinion of those who campaigned to abolish slavery, who believed that all human beings were created
equal in the image of
God. In
Britain, the conviction that slavery was an unacceptable affront to this
religiously hallowed idea of common humanity was vividly conveyed in the ceramic badge manufactured by
Josiah Wedgwood, on which a kneeling, manacled
black slave cries out, perhaps in despair, perhaps in hope, “Am I not a man and a brother?”
⁴²
In the United States, similar sentiments were expressed by
Theodore Dwight Weld: “no condition of birth, no shade of colour, no misfortune of circumstances” could “annul
the birthright charter, which God has bequeathed to every being upon whom he has stamped his own image,” by which he meant the freedom and equality all humans should enjoy. Any society based on the race hierarchy of
slavery was an affront to the creator. “The real battleground between liberty and slavery,” agreed
Samuel Cornish, who had established the first black newspaper in New York City, “is prejudice against colour.”
⁴³

To be sure, the many abolitionists in many lands had many motives for wishing to see the end of slavery, but the progress of that cause and its success in
Britain (1833), the
Netherlands (1863), the United States (1865),
Spain (1886), and Brazil (1888) owed much to the moral conviction that its continued existence was an affront to the claim that all men were created equal by God.
⁴⁴
These views also underlay the steps taken in the United States to reorder its polity in the aftermath of
Emancipation, by dismantling the legal sanctions that had upheld the slave-society hierarchy based on the “narrow bounds of race.” The
Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, wrote equal citizenship for all people born in the United States (except “Indians not taxed”), into the
Constitution, thereby nullifying the
Dred Scott
decision; the
Fifteenth Amendment, ratified two years later, prohibited individual states from making race a qualification for voting. The result was that
American whites and blacks were for the first time deemed to be equal members of the human race and of the American body politic, as the color line previously maintained between them was legally dismantled and constitutionally abolished. In the words of
William Curtis, the editor of
Harper’s Weekly
, the Civil War and Emancipation had transformed America from being a nation “for white men” only into one “for mankind” as a whole.
⁴⁵

Yet despite its intrinsic inconsistencies and contradictions, and notwithstanding the abolition of slavery, racialist thought and identities, reinforced by
social Darwinist ideas of race struggle, became
more
influential in the Western world during the years of high
imperialism. In Britain, the historian
E. A. Freeman celebrated the triumph of the
Anglo-Saxons, whose capacity for self-government he thought unrivaled, and whose superiority over all other races he constantly proclaimed.
⁴⁶
Sir
Charles Dilke in
Greater Britain
(1868) and Sir
John Seeley in
The Expansion of England
(1883) thought of the British Empire primarily in terms of the “white” parts of it, namely
Canada,
Australia,
New Zealand, and
South Africa. By the early twentieth century, this “enlarged” British identity was articulated by figures such as
James Bryce, in his lectures on race proclaiming transoceanic Anglo-Saxon superiority, and by
Cecil Rhodes, who believed the English were “the finest race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race.” Hence the
Rhodes Scholarships, designed “to promote the unity and extend the influence of the English-speaking race” by bringing Britons from the overseas dominions to study at Oxford University.
⁴⁷
As such, the British Empire was an essentially Anglo-Saxon enterprise, and when
Rudyard Kipling urged the Americans to adopt a similarly assertive policy, he did so in a poem that exhorted its readers to “take up the white man’s burden.”
⁴⁸

Kipling’s verses were addressed to
Theodore Roosevelt, and when he became American president he enthusiastically accepted the challenge. Like Bryce, Roosevelt had been influenced by the writings of
E. A. Freeman, and he believed in Anglo-Saxon racial destiny and superiority, dismissing
native Americans as “savages” and blacks as “wholly unfit for the suffrage”; these views were widely shared among the governing elite by such figures as
Henry Cabot Lodge and
Woodrow Wilson, and by many white Americans who continued to regard blacks as intrinsically inferior.
⁴⁹
The preoccupation with racial identities and rankings only intensified as immigrants poured into the United States from central, southern, and eastern Europe and threatened the traditional dominance of white Anglo-Saxon
Protestants. One response, in
William Z. Ripley’s
The Races of Europe
(1899) and by the
Dictionary of Races and Peoples
(produced in 1911 by the U.S.
Immigration Commission), was to specify more elaborate racial rankings, inserting
Jews, Italians, and Hungarians between the Anglo-Saxons at the top and the blacks and Native Americans at the bottom. A second and more anxious reaction, as proclaimed by
E. A. Ross in
The Old World in the New
(1914) and by
Madison Grant in
The Passing of the Great Race
(1916), was to warn that the influx of these new immigrants meant that pure Anglo-Saxon Americans would be overwhelmed by lesser, alien races.
⁵⁰

In Germany, racial thought and categories also hardened, once the Reich had been created in 1870, with the aim of aligning the boundaries of
political authority with those of racial identity: the cult of Aryan superiority intensified, as did the belief in “volkish” nationalism that owed much to
Herder and
Wagner. Less than a decade after unification, works were appearing such as
William Marr’s
Jewry’s Victory over Teutonism
(1879) and
Eugen Dühring’s
The Jewish Question
(1881), which took a hostile attitude to their subject, encapsulated in the observation of the historian
Heinrich von Treitschke that “the
Jews are our misfortune.”
⁵¹
The result was a growing fear (or hope) that there must be a race war between the
Aryans and the Jews, in which the forces of light and darkness would fight to the death for world domination, and which the Aryans must win. This view was put forward by
Georges de Lapouge in his book
The Aryan: His Social Role
(1899), and more vividly by
Houston Stewart Chamberlain in his
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
(also 1899), which became a best seller in Germany in the years before 1914. Chamberlain was English by birth, but had settled in Germany, where he married Wagner’s daughter. He was a passionate believer in the importance of race identities and in Aryan superiority as embodied in the pan-German
“Volk,” and he loathed the Jews, whom he regarded as the epitome of evil, against whom the Aryans must wage an unrelenting,
Manichean struggle.
⁵²

The racial identities and antagonisms being proclaimed in Britain, the United States, and Germany were paralleled in many parts of Europe, from the
Russia of the Jewish pogroms to the
France of the Dreyfus Affair to the
Austria where the young
Adolf Hitler was growing up in the
anti-Semitic environment of fin-de-siècle Vienna. But race thought in Great Britain, the American Republic, and the German Reich was distinguished by a growing sense that these countries shared a common identity transcending the boundaries of their separate nations. One version of this community was the “English-speaking peoples,” encompassing the Anglo-Saxon stock of Britain, plus the four dominions of
Canada,
Australia,
New Zealand, and
South Africa, and the United States: indeed,
Cecil
Rhodes sought to “promote the unity and extend the influence of the English-speaking race,”
and his scholarship scheme included awards for Americans as well as those from the British Empire.
⁵³
A more extended version of the Anglo-Saxon brotherhood included the
Aryan or Teutonic
races of Germany, descended from the same racial stock as the British and the Americans, and who shared the same gifts for self-government. The Rhodes Scholarships also recognized the existence of this greater racial community and sought to strengthen it: in a codicil to his will, Rhodes granted five awards to Germany, in addition to those already assigned to the British Empire and the United States.
⁵⁴

During the decades before the
First World War, the identities built around the collectivities and consciousnesses of race were widely believed to be more significant than those constructed on the alternative basis of
religion,
gender, or class, while in Britain, the United States, and Germany the global potentialities of race identities went beyond the limited boundaries of the
nation-state. The result was that the century from the 1880s witnessed many attempts to create structures of rule and authority on the basis of racial identities and
hierarchies, and these efforts took two forms, the inclusionary and the exclusionary. The inclusionary variant permitted the incorporation and coexistence of different races within a nation or empire, on the basis of a rigid hierarchy, which was enforced to keep the races ranked and separate; the exclusionary denied that different racial groups should coexist within the same polity, and sought to expel those who belonged to unwanted inferior stock, or prevent them from gaining entry in the first place.
⁵⁵
The inclusionary variant characterized regimes in which whites asserted their superiority over indigenous
blacks; the exclusionary characterized
anti-Semitic regimes, which sought to exclude (and even exterminate)
Jews, who were a threat to racial purity and thus could not be tolerated. Either way,
political power was employed to promote one (superior) race over other (inferior) races, and to this end, inclusionary and exclusionary measures were often employed together.
⁵⁶

To a marked degree, the European powers created empires
that proclaimed “the omnipresence of racial differences,” for one underlying presumption was the superiority of the white man over those whom
Kipling described as “lesser breeds without the law,” and who were invariably dark-skinned.
⁵⁷
One of the ways in which
Canada,
Australia,
New Zealand, and
South
Africa proclaimed their sense of national identity was as “white man’s countries.” Their ruling elites believed the colored races were intrinsically different and inferior, that they should live separate lives in separate areas, and that they were unsuited to
politics and government. As a result, native peoples were dispossessed of their lands, and were either disenfranchised or prevented from holding the vote, ostensibly because of their limited literacy and command of English, but in practice because they had the wrong skin color.
⁵⁸
In Australia, the
Commonwealth
Franchise Act of 1902 denied
Aboriginal men and women the vote, and when the Union of South Africa was created in 1910 it was on the basis of a de facto all-white franchise. One of the Union’s architects was the young Afrikaner
J. C. Smuts, who did not “believe in politics for them,” namely black people, and insisted that whites and blacks should be separated, because
“racial blood mixture is an evil.” It was in South Africa that the politics of racial exclusion culminated in the
Native Land Act of 1913, which confined black Africans, who formed the great majority of the population, to 7 percent of its territory, and prevented them from owning or leasing land in areas set aside for whites.
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