The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (11 page)

To be sure, widening franchises at home and in some settler colonies did not necessarily portend decolonization – if anything, the British Empire became truly popular only in the last half-century of its existence. But democratization did make it harder to justify major peacetime expenditures on imperial security when metropolitan electorates were manifestly more interested in social security. Only in time of war, as the British discovered in their painful struggle to subjugate the Boers, could the public be relied on to rally to the flag; and even that emotion could quickly turn to disenchantment when the price of victory became clear. This was something of which even the most enthusiastic imperialists were acutely aware. Of the 726,000 people who had left the United Kingdom in the last decade of the nineteenth century, 72 per cent had gone not to other parts of the British Empire but to the United States. ‘The great problem of the coming years’, conceded
The Times
uneasily,

will be to consolidate the Empire, to bring its several parts into organic and vital relation with each other and with the old country, their common origin and home, to convert the noble impulse which has led the sons of all the colonies to help the Empire in its need [in South Africa] into a working bond of indissoluble union.

As the newspaper admitted, however, ‘the solution of this problem is not to be propounded off-hand’.

This imperial world had once been a racial melting pot. Whether in the Caribbean, America or India, British businessmen and soldiers had felt no compunction about sleeping with and in many cases marrying indigenous women. To take a native concubine had been
the norm for employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company; it had been positively encouraged by its East Indian counterpart, which in 1778 offered five rupees as a christening present for every child born to a soldier and his (invariably) Indian wife. The founders of the British colony for freed slaves at Sierra Leone had also made no objection to mixed marriages. The situation was, of course, somewhat different for those Africans and their descendants who remained as slaves in the New World, but there too interbreeding had gone on. Thomas Jefferson was by no means the only master to take advantage of his power for the sake of sexual gratification: there were at least 60,000 ‘mulattos’ in North America by the end of the colonial period.

‘Demic diffusion’ had gone even further in other empires, where settlers tended to be single men rather than whole families. In Brazil sexual relations between early Portuguese settlers, natives and African slaves were relatively uninhibited, even if largely confined to concubinage. The story was broadly the same in Spanish America. By 1605, when the Hispanic-Peruvian historian Garcilaso de la Vega sought to give a precise definition of the term ‘Creole’, he had to coin such terms as ‘Quarteron’ or ‘Quartratuo’ to convey the difference between Creoles proper (the offspring of Spanish and Indian parents) and the children produced by a Spaniard and a Creole. The Dutch too had little hesitation in taking native concubines when they settled in Asia (though the practice was less common among the Boers in South Africa). From Canada to Senegal to Madagascar, the
métis
were an almost universal by-product of French colonial settlement. One French colonial writer, Médéric-Louis-Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry, identified thirteen different hues of skin colour in his account of the island of Saint-Domingue, published in 1797.

Yet by 1901 there had been a worldwide revulsion against ‘miscegenation’. As early as 1808, all ‘Eurasians’ had been excluded from the East India Company’s forces, and in 1835 intermarriage was formally banned in British India. In the aftermath of the 1857 Mutiny, attitudes towards interracial sex hardened as part of a general process of segregation, a phenomenon usually, though not quite justly, attributed to the increasing presence and influence of white women in India. As numerous stories by Kipling, Somerset Maugham and others
testify,
*
interracial unions continued, but their progeny were viewed with undisguised disdain. In 1888 the official brothels that served the British army in India were abolished, while in 1919 the Crewe Circular expressly banned officials throughout the Empire from taking native mistresses. By this time, the idea that miscegenation implied degeneration, and that criminality was correlated to the ratio of native to white blood, had been generally accepted in expatriate circles. Throughout the Empire, there was also a growing (and largely fantastic) obsession with the sexual threat supposedly posed to white women by native men. The theme can be found in two of the most popular works of fiction produced by the British rule in India, E. M. Forster’s
A Passage to India
and Paul Scott’s
The Jewel in the Crown
, and also gave rise to a bitter campaign to prevent Indian judges hearing cases involving white women. By 1901 racial segregation was the norm in most of the British Empire. It was most explicit in South Africa, however, where Dutch settlers had from an early stage banned marriage between
burghers
and blacks. Their descendants were the driving force behind subsequent legislation. In 1897 the Boer republic of the Transvaal prohibited white women from having extramarital intercourse with black men, and this became the template for legislation in the Cape Colony (1902), Natal and the Orange Free State (1903), as well as in neighbouring Rhodesia.

In many ways, pseudo-science merely provided sophisticated rationales for such measures. Ideas like ‘Social Darwinism’, which erroneously inferred from Darwin’s theories a struggle for survival between the races, or ‘racial hygiene’, which argued that physical and mental degeneration would result from miscegenation, came some time after prohibitions had been enacted. This was especially obvious in Britain’s North American colonies and the United States. From the earliest phase of British settlement in North America there had been laws designed to discourage miscegenation and to circumscribe the rights of mulattos. Interracial marriage may have been a punishable offence in Virginia from as early as 1630 and was formally prohibited
by legislation in 1662; the colony of Maryland had passed similar legislation a year earlier. Such laws were passed by five other North American colonies. In the century after the foundation of the United States, no fewer than thirty-eight states banned interracial marriages. In 1915, twenty-eight states retained such statutes; ten of them had gone so far as to make the prohibition on miscegenation constitutional. There was even an attempt, in December 1912, to amend the federal constitution so as to prohibit ‘forever… intermarriage between negros or persons of color and Caucasians… within the United States’. The language of the various statutes and constitutional articles certainly changed over time, as rationalizations for the ban on interracial sex evolved, and as new threats to racial purity emerged. Definitions of whiteness and blackness became more precise: in Virginia, for example, anyone with one or more ‘Negro’ grandparents was defined as a ‘Negro’, but it was possible to have one ‘Indian’ great-grandparent and still be white in the eyes of the law. Depending on patterns of immigration, a number of states extended their prohibitions to include ‘Mongolians’, ‘Asiatic Indians’, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos and Malays. Penalties also varied widely. Some laws simply declared interracial unions null and void, depriving couples of the legal privileges of marriage; others specified penalties of up to ten years in prison. Nevertheless, the underlying motivation seems remarkably consistent and enduring.

Legal prohibitions could not prevent the emergence of a substantial mixed-race population in North America. Yet precisely this social reality appears to have heightened, if it did not actually create, anxieties about miscegenation, giving rise to a large body of more or less lurid literature on the subject. In
The Races of Men
, published in Philadelphia in 1850, Robert Knox emphatically repudiated the idea that any good could come of the ‘amalgamation of races’; the ‘mullato’ was ‘a monstrosity of nature’. Among the most influential opponents of miscegenation was the Swiss-American polygenist and Harvard professor Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz. In August 1863 he was asked by Samuel Gridley Howe, the head of Lincoln’s American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission, whether ‘the African race… will be a
persistent
race in this country; or, will it be absorbed, diluted, & finally effaced by the white race’. The government, Agassiz replied, should ‘put every
possible obstacle to the crossing of the races, and the increase of the half-breeds’:

The production of half-breeds is as much a sin against nature, as incest in a civilized community is a sin against purity of character… Far from presenting to me a natural solution of our difficulties, the idea of amalgamation is most repugnant to my feelings, I hold it to be a perversion of every natural sentiment… No efforts should be spared to check that which is abhorrent to our better nature, and to the progress of the higher civilization and a purer morality… Conceive for a moment the difference it would make in future ages, for the prospect of republican institutions and our civilization generally, if instead of the manly population descended from cognate nations the United States should hereafter be inhabited by the effeminate progeny of mixed races, half indian, half negro, sprinkled with white blood… I shudder from the consequences… How shall we eradicate the stigma of a lower race when its blood has once been allowed to flow freely into that of our children?

Within the broader debate over the abolition of slavery, argument raged as to the relative strength, morals and fecundity of mulattos, with some authorities asserting their ‘hybrid vigour’, while others – notably the physician and ‘niggerologist’ Josiah Nott – insisted on their degeneracy. In 1864 two anti-abolition journalists caused an outcry by publishing a satirical tract entitled
Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro
, which argued facetiously that interbreeding made the races more fertile, and that this was the key to the success of Southern arms in the Civil War. What most opponents of emancipation actually believed was that (in the words of the eminent palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist E. D. Cope) ‘the hybrid is not as good a race as the white, and in some respects it often falls below the black especially in the sturdy qualities that accompany vigorous physique.’ According to Nott, miscegenation would lead ultimately to extinction because the children of mixed marriages would be sterile themselves or would produce sterile progeny. The ‘half-caste’ was also suspected of posing a threat to social order. The sociologist Edward Byron Reuter argued that it was mulattos, a ‘discontented and psychologically unstable group’, who were responsible for ‘the acute phases of the so-called race problem’. It is striking, too, that precursors of
the story later told in Arthur Dinter’s notorious novel
The Sin Against the Blood
(see
Chapter 7
) can already be found in American novels like Robert Lee Durham’s
Call of the South
(1908), in which it is the daughter of the president himself who gives birth to a dark-skinned child.

Thus, although slavery was abolished after the Civil War, the Southern states lost little time in erecting a system of segregation, in which prohibitions on intermarriage and intercourse played a central role. That said, the absence of formal prohibitions in the North by no means implied a toleration of interracial relationships. Franz Boas, Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, was highly unusual in recommending intermarriage (albeit only ‘between white men and negro women’) as a way of reducing racial tensions. Few shared his vision. Indeed, as Gunnar Myrdal noted in
An American Dilemma
(1944), racial anxieties appeared to increase when formal barriers between the races were removed. Mixed-race couples were generally ostracized by white society and, as long as the Supreme Court upheld the legality of state bans on mixed marriages, such couples remained a very small minority. American anxieties about racial mingling were only increased by the new waves of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, despite the fact that, at least in the first generation, the new immigrants practised quite strict endogamy. Yet it was not in the United States that the reaction against interracial marriage took its most extreme form. It was in Europe; most surprisingly, in Germany.

It is at first sight odd that hostility to miscegenation should also have manifested itself as anti-Semitism. Of all ethnic groups, few exceeded the Jews in their commitment – in principle, at least – to endogamy. The Torah is quite explicit on this score:

When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee… thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor
shew mercy unto them: Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.

Divine retribution would be swift and severe in cases of transgression. Daughters who dared to marry out of the faith were formally pronounced dead. Some, though not all, Jewish communities followed this injunction quite strictly. In Britain, for example, the small Jewish community that had re-established itself in the late seventeenth century saw very few marriages out before the 1830s, when the apostasy of Nathan Rothschild’s daughter and her marriage to Henry Fitzroy caused intense family distress and communal dismay. Indeed, the rate of intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles remained very low in Britain before 1901, despite the relatively small size of the Jewish community. It is not too much to say that in Victorian times opposition to mixed marriages was probably stronger among Jews than among non-Jews. Yet this did not prevent anxieties about the sexual appetites of Jews from surfacing in British literature. An early example is Farquhar’s play of 1702
The Twin Rivals
, in which the licentious Mr Moabite, a rich Jew of Lombard Street, secretly conveys to his house a young lady about to give birth to his bastard child, whom he wishes to raise as a Jew. Hogarth’s
The Harlot’s Progress
, dramatized by Theophilus Cibber in 1733, further develops the theme of Jewish lasciviousness, and still more Jewish fornicators and lechers can be found in Fielding’s play
Miss Lucy in Town
, or in Smollett’s
Roderick Random
and
Peregrine Pickle
. Where the eighteenth century satirized, the early nineteenth century romanticized. The ‘wandering Jew’ with his beautiful (and perhaps convertible) daughter were familiar figures in novels like Scott’s
Ivanhoe
and John Galt’s
The Wandering Jew
, not to mention George Eliot’s relatively benign
Daniel Deronda
. By the end of the nineteenth century, by contrast, Jews in English literature had become more closely associated with ‘white slavery’, a euphemism for prostitution.