The end of slavery did not bring dramatic change for most people of African descent in the Americas, however. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the multi-category racial hierarchies that had developed in the colonial period provided some social and economic mobility for mixed-race people with lighter skin. Those with darker skin remained on the bottom. Former slaves generally became sharecroppers or tenant farmers, or workers in mines and factories, as did indigenous people. In the United States, after a brief period following the Civil War in which former slaves voted and a few were even elected to office, white Southerners reasserted their power, passing so-called Jim Crow laws to keep blacks from voting through literacy tests, poll taxes, and property restrictions, and enforcing rigid racial segregation in schools, housing, employment, and every other aspect of life. Most former slaves became sharecroppers on white-owned land, paying landowners about half a year's crops in return for seed, mules, a cabin, and tools. Black domestic servants were found in many white households, but otherwise even brothels, taverns, and toilets were supposed to be racially segregated. In the dichotomous racial system that had developed in the United States, even a small amount of “black blood” made one black, an idea reaffirmed with a vengeance in the 1896 US Supreme Court case Plessy vs. Ferguson, which upheld a lower court case requiring a New Orleans man who was one-eighth black to ride in a “colored” railway car. This “separate but equal” doctrine made racial segregation legal, and was enforced in all Southern states; in reality segregated schools and other facilities were never equal.
5.3 A woman dominates her tiny (and drunken) husband in this anti-suffrage postcard from early twentieth-century England. Suffragists and their opponents waged their battle in all available media.
Racial segregation and discrimination in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries were bolstered by new ideas about the reasons for differences among groups of people understood as grounded in science. In On the Origin of Species by the Means of Natural Selection (1859), the British scientist Charles Darwin proposed that all life had evolved from a common origin through the process of natural selection, by which small differences within individuals in one species had given them advantages that allowed them to gain more food or better living conditions. This made them more successful in reproduction and allowed them to pass on their genetic material to the next generation. Because Darwin included humans in his conceptualization, this idea provoked furious controversy, although today evolution by natural selection is one of the fundamental principles of biology. The English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and others applied evolutionary thinking to human society, arguing that history was a “survival of the fittest” in which the strong were destined to triumph and prosper and the weak be conquered or remain poor. This “Social Darwinism”—a term coined later by its opponents—built on existing ideas about qualities passed on in the blood and about ethnic superiority, which were being enhanced at just this point by the growth of nationalism. “Survival of the fittest” was applied to every sort of difference: nation, ethnicity, race, gender, class. European and American scientists and physicians, along with scholars in new fields such as anthropology and psychology, sought to provide proof of these differences by measuring skulls, brains, facial angles, forehead height (the origin of the terms highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow), and other features, publishing their findings in scholarly and professional journals and in books and articles for a more popular audience. Unsurprisingly, their findings supported the idea that whites were more intelligent than other races, what the black American historian and activist W.E.B. Dubois (1868–1963) called in 1910 “this new religion of whiteness.” Whiteness also had gradations of fitness, however, as scientists, thinkers, and political leaders sought to prove the existence of a northern European “Nordic race” or “Aryan race” superior to southern Europeans, identified Jews as a separate “Semitic race,” and asserted that criminals and the poor were anatomically different.
These ideas led to calls for social and political changes, as groups advocating change in this era included many that wanted less equality, not more. In the western United States, hostility toward Chinese workers led to riots and other types of violence, and to restrictions on immigration by place of origin. These began with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which forbade Chinese laborers from entering the country and prohibited those already in the USA from becoming citizens. The world was divided, as one US Senator put it, between beef-eating men and rice-eating men, and the beef-eating men needed to protect themselves from what was regularly referred to across the English-speaking world as the “yellow peril.” In the eastern United States, worries centered on immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, often Catholics or Jews, which Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the leader of the Senate and a close friend of President Theodore Roosevelt, described as “removed from us in race and blood.” (By “us” he meant Anglo-Saxons, also viewed as a race in this era.) In 1894, three recent Harvard University graduates established the Immigration Restriction League, which pushed for literacy tests as a requirement of immigration; these became part of a comprehensive Immigration Act in 1917. This act also banned “homosexuals, idiots, feeble-minded persons, criminals, professional beggars,” and others judged “mentally or physically defective,” along with all immigration from an “Asiatic Barred Zone” that stretched from Turkey to New Guinea. The subsequent Immigration Act of 1924 continued these bans, and sought to freeze the existing ethnic distribution by introducing nationality quotas set according to the census of 1890, thus before most eastern and southern Europeans had immigrated. National quotas remained the basis of US immigration policy until 1965. In Australia, which became self-governing in the 1850s, the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1901 closed immigration to Asians completely and established a “white Australia policy” that remained on the books until the 1970s. Similar measures were passed in New Zealand and Canada in the 1920s. Governments of industrialized countries thus acted to assure the free flow of capital and commodities, but prohibited that of people.
In Brazil and Cuba, measures were passed to encourage immigration from Europe, not only to bring in labor for plantations and factories, but explicitly to “whiten” the population through intermarriage with people already there. In many parts of the world, color lines were drawn around territories, districts, and neighborhoods to separate white from non-white spaces. Documents identifying race, place of birth, parents, and other personal characteristics were developed and required, part of an increasingly routine surveillance and management of human life that the French social theorist Michel Foucault has called “biopower.”
For some, “survival of the fittest” was not to be left to natural selection or immigration restrictions alone, but should be shaped by the intentional selective breeding of certain types of people and the prevention of breeding among the unfit. This idea was promulgated in the eugenics movement, which gained broad acceptance around the world in the first third of the twentieth century, with financial support from governments, universities, foundations established by major industrialists such as the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations, and civic groups. Laws ordering sterilization of criminals, the “feeble-minded” or others viewed as genetically undesirable were passed in the United States, Canada, Japan, Brazil, and most of the countries of Europe, and tens of thousands of people were sterilized. People applying for marriage licenses were required to have medical certifications, and laws added eugenics language about “racial integrity” and “racial hygiene” to prohibitions on marriage between certain groups. Various positive measures were also adopted, including payments or tax breaks for couples who had the appropriate type of children, and “better baby” and “fitter family” contests that presented awards to children and families with certain physical and behavioral characteristics. Both negative and positive measures used elsewhere were adopted by Nazi Germany, and carried to extremes, as hundreds of thousands of people viewed as physically or mentally unfit were for
cibly sterilized or simply killed, experiments were conducted on children to test genetic theories, marriages between “Aryans” and “non-Aryans” were declared “racial defilement” (Rassenschande) and prohibited, and awards were presented to women who bore many “Aryan” children. Eugenics was discredited by its association with Nazi racial ideology, although forced sterilization programs of mentally handicapped individuals continued at least into the 1960s and perhaps longer.
5.4 Better Baby Contest, sponsored by the Kallpolis Grotto Masonic Lodge, Washington, DC, 1931. The original newspaper caption commented that a staff of forty physicians and nurses was “faced with the stupendous task of examining 983 children between the ages of 2 months and 5 years,” and that “at least 8 hours will be required to inspect all the youngsters.”
Population growth and migration
Eugenics and other racial ideologies developed in a world in which not just the fittest were surviving. As a species, humans were showing amazing evolutionary success, reproducing and passing their genetic material to the next generation very well. Despite continued famines, war, and epidemics, beginning about 1700 global population began to go up, and especially after 1750 to go up at a steadily increasing rate. Without significant immigration from other parts of the world, and despite fairly substantial emigration to the Americas, the population of Europe nearly doubled from 1750 to 1850, from about 140 million to about 270 million, and that of England tripled. Public health measures, especially water and sewer systems that lessened contagious and intestinal diseases, were one important factor. Contagious diseases tend to hit infants and children particularly hard, so that a slight reduction in their occurrence decreases infant and child mortality faster than the mortality of adults, which has a multiplier effect, as those children grow up to have their own children. Draining swamps and marshes—done to increase agricultural land, not as a public health measure—reduced the fly and mosquito population, which lessened outbreaks of malaria and other insect-borne diseases. Climatic conditions improved slightly after the cooling trend in the seventeenth century, which brought increases in food production and fewer disastrous harvests. Food could be transported on canal and railroad systems, lessening localized famines. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century armies were larger and their weapons were deadlier, but they were generally provisioned rather than living off the land, so they confiscated less food and supplies than had earlier armies. Historians and demographers debate exactly which of these factors was the most important, but there is no debate about the actual trends.
In Europe, the decline in death rates and consequent population growth accompanied industrialization, which also happened in Japan, where population grew from 33 million at the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1872 (about the same as the population of the United Kingdom at that point, and somewhat less than the population of the United States or France) to 69 million in 1935. By this time about a third of the Japanese people lived in cities, including 6 million in Tokyo. Rice production increased with the use of new varieties and techniques, and public health measures improved sanitation and the water supply. Railroads constructed in the last part of the nineteenth century carried rice and other foodstuffs to the growing cities from rural areas, and ships brought food from overseas.
Elsewhere the decline in death rates occurred without high levels of industrialization. In China, population began to grow steadily in the eighteenth century as well, in part because of the increased food supply that resulted from New World crops such as corn and the sweet potato, but also because of the Qing government's measures to improve transportation networks and distribute food or adjust taxation (paid in grain) during shortages. Estimates of the population of China place it at about 150–200 million in 1700, and 400 million in 1900. In India, the population grew from about 100 million in 1700 to about 300 million in 1900, aided by expanded irrigation systems and a rail network that carried food to famine-struck areas.
Declining death rates had other effects besides increasing the total population. They gradually regularized the process of life, and death became associated with aging, rather than being something that occurred randomly. Infant and child mortality slowly declined, so that the most perilous years of life—the period in which the greatest percentage of the population died—were no longer the first five. Even more dramatic was a decrease in mortality among older children and adolescents. In 1750, a ten-year-old child in France had a one in four chance of dying before his or her mother; by 1850 this had declined significantly (and today it is about one in sixty).
Most leaders and opinion-shapers who were aware of the growing population of their own nations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw this as a cause for celebration, as they regarded a large population as essential for a strong country. A few did worry that the growth in population might outstrip any surplus, however. The Qing scholar Hong Liangji (1746–1809) and the English clergyman and economist Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) both argued that population increases geometrically while food supply increases arithmetically, so that population will always outstrip food supply. They looked to history as well as mathematical models for their proof, noting the many times that famine, disease, and war had served as a check on population growth. They wondered when their societies would reach what later economists called the “Malthusian limit” and suffer a catastrophic collapse, and suggested measures that might delay this, such as emigration. Malthus also suggested moral restraint might lower the birth rate, as would what he termed “vice,” by which he meant contraception.
For working-class families, lower child mortality was both joyful and burdensome, and the demand for contraception grew in the late nineteenth century. The same leaders who described the family as a private haven viewed birth control as a highly public issue, however, passing laws that prohibited the distribution of birth control devices, and arresting those who disseminated birth control information, especially when this was to working-class women. Religious authorities also made pronouncements on this issue; Pope Pius IX, for example, declared in 1869 that the fetus acquires a soul at conception rather than at quickening, which had been the standard Western opinion before that point. (Quickening is the point when a mother feels movement, usually about the third or fourth month; the word “quick” is an old word for alive, as in the phrase “the quick and the dead.”) Any postconception methods of contraception would thus be considered abortion, whereas until this point they had been viewed as contraception, a lesser sin. Birth rates did begin to go down slightly in industrialized countries in the first half of the twentieth century, but not until birth control became culturally acceptable, more reliable, and more widely available in the 1960s did families grow significantly smaller.
The other option suggested by Malthus and Hong Liangji for overpopulation—migration—was a far more common solution than contraception to population pressures and poverty, and also to religious persecution, war, political turmoil, family stresses, and other problems that pushed migrants from their homelands. Migrants were pulled to certain parts of the world by the hope of a better life, often influenced by agents, labor brokers, and advertisements that promised land, high wages, or easy riches. The hysteria about immigrants in the early twentieth century was fueled by racism, but also by the fact that steamships had made long-distance migration much easier and cheaper, and millions of people moved.
In the century before the outbreak of World War I in 1914, 50–60 million Europeans emigrated, with the crest coming in the first decade of the twentieth century. Some of these eventually returned to Europe—no statistics were kept on return migration, so it is impossible to know how many did—but most stayed. More than half went to the United States, including 4 million Irish, which together with the potato famine cut the Irish population by half. Two million British and Irish people moved to Australia and New Zealand, beginning in 1787 when a thousand convicts were sent to a penal colony established at Botany Bay (today's Sydney) after the American War of Independence made
transporting British convicts to North America no longer feasible. Australia was already populated by 300,000–800,000 Aborigines, but the British simply ignored this, declaring the land empty. The white population of Australia—most of whom were actually voluntary migrants, not convicts—remained small until gold was discovered in 1851, when it ballooned, some coming from California, which had experienced a similar gold rush two years earlier. The gold rush also brought in Chinese workers, who as in the USA built railroads, which carried settlers in and wool and wheat from Australia's expanding sheep ranches and farms out. Also as in the USA, racist hostility to Asians led to riots and legislation increasingly limiting Asian immigration.
Many southern Europeans moved to South America, where they formed the majority of the population in rapidly growing cities such as Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. Here they worked twelve-hour days in meatpacking, food-processing, wool production and other industries that processed South American raw materials, but had a better chance of upward mobility than they would have had in Europe and gradually came to dominate certain industries and move into the middle class. In contrast to European immigrants to North America, who generally went as family groups, most European immigrants to Latin America and the Caribbean were young single males. They married indigenous, African-background, or mixed-race women, further increasing the ethnic and cultural mixture. That pattern can now be traced through genetic evidence. In Brazil for example, around 75–80 percent of the gene pool in the early twenty-first century comes from Europe, around 15 percent from Africa, and around 10 percent is indigenous, with most people having a mixture of all of these, no matter what their classification on the national census or outward appearance; almost all of the African and indigenous genetic material comes from their mother's side. This mixture was reflected in new musical forms that blended African and European traditions, including the tango in Argentina and the samba in Brazil, which were then carried around the world through further immigration or by traveling bands and singers who entertained at clubs and dance halls. In part to counter eugenicist ideas about “racial hygiene” that were gaining an audience in Brazil, the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre (1900–87) developed the idea that blending such as this gave Brazil an edge economically as well as culturally. That idea was later extended to Portugal and all of its colonies in an ideology known as Lusotropicalism, though Freyre was criticized for ignoring the very real racial and social hierarchies of Brazil and creating a myth of racial harmony and democracy.
A Concise History of the World Page 36
