The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  Vestiges presents a unified theory of evolution encompassing the cosmos and all living things, including people. The stars and all the heavens had developed from spontaneous electrical generation, giving rise to every form of life through means of elaboration from the lowest, simplest organism to man’s apex in Europeans. While only one of its twenty-one chapters deals with humans, its tone is ambivalent. Chambers is a monogenesist, seeing all people as products of the same origin. But he hesitates over the possibility of a brotherhood of man. Chambers (like the early American Samuel Stanhope Smith) stresses the influence of lifestyle on personal appearance, including beauty. Unlike Emerson, who compared Englishmen to oaks, Chambers contrasts “the soft round forms of the English” with “the lank features of their descendants, the Americans.”33

  Despite condemnation by experts, Vestiges leaped to best-sellerdom in Britain and the United States, with seven printings in its first year, and in the seventeen years between its publication and the appearance of Charles Darwin’s Origins of the Species, it sold 23,750 copies. Emerson’s copy belongs to an 1845 American printing.34 In some quarters, Chambers’s book is carelessly cited as a precursor to Darwin. Its thesis and methods differed greatly from Darwin’s, but both authors faced the criticism that their science contradicted scripture.35

  Though Chambers wrote Vestiges in secrecy and published it anonymously, Emerson quickly learned the author’s identity, most likely via the journalist Alexander Ireland, who knew both parties. When Emerson expressed a desire to meet the Chambers brothers, Ireland invited Emerson to Britain in 1846, sweetening his invitation with the promise of a lucrative speaking itinerary.36 Ireland finally introduced Chambers and Emerson in London in 1848, and they evidently had a pleasant visit.37 However, Emerson never met his other Scottish authority, Robert Knox.

  EMERSON DID read Robert Knox’s The Races of Men: A Fragment (1850) and rather liked what he saw.38 At bottom he agreed with Knox’s sense of the importance of race and his conviction that races deteriorate away from their home territory. Emerson also shared Knox’s aesthetic ranking of the races and denigration of the Irish Celts. Knox, like Carlyle, was a Lowland Scot, and the “Low” counted as fully for Knox as for Carlyle and for the same reason: “Low” would make them Saxons untainted by Celtic blood.

  Unlike Robert Chambers, Knox (1791–1862) had been impeccably schooled as a medical doctor in Edinburgh and France. Still young in the 1820s, he lectured on anatomy in the famous medical school of the University of Edinburgh while publishing a score of papers on animal anatomy still to be found on the shelves of the Princeton University Library.

  Then, in Knox’s fortieth year, scandal struck. The cadavers so essential to his anatomy lessons, it turned out, had been supplied by a notorious pair of Irish thugs named Burke and Hare, who were murdering people for the express purpose of delivering their bodies to Knox’s dissection table. Although Knox escaped conviction, he left Edinburgh in disgrace and turned to translating scientific papers and lecturing on the anthropology of man, starting, naturally, with the race he deemed best: the Saxon.

  For Knox “race or hereditary descent is everything; it stamps the man.” Like all the other Western racists of the time, he placed the darkest-skinned and poorest people—Africans and Australians—at the bottom of his racial hierarchy.39 That much was a given. But, as in German race theories, questions of color, indeed of any peoples outside of Europe, counted for little in Knox’s racial scheme. He cared most about the locals, the Saxons and the Celts, whom he saw as permanently opposed. To enforce that view, Knox also needed to denigrate Blumenbach’s “Caucasian” designation, a big tent encompassing peoples from North Africa, Spain, Europe, Russia, Turkey, and India. Far too broad, Knox grumbled, this was just “Blumenbach’s Caucasian dream.”40

  Knox’s prominence as an anthropologist peaked following the revolutions of 1848, which had also galvanized another political reactionary appalled by revolution, Arthur de Gobineau. The revolutions of 1848 happened to precede the time when Emerson was preparing English Traits.41 In the 1850s, Knox’s Saxonism accelerated a drift toward racial determinism in British and American anthropology that would dominate the field for another seventy-five years. Knox’s 1850 treatise, The Races of Man: A Fragment, was reissued in 1862 as The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations. Then, as Darwin took over center stage, Knox’s work fell into relative obscurity until its return to fame in our own times, when scholars seeking a racist bogeyman in science revived his work, only to revile it.

  Emerson had worked himself into a hole. He wanted to trumpet the determining force of race along the lines of Robert Knox, but he had trouble holding on to that view. In English Traits he waffles on purity and permanence, though in almost everything else he favors continuity, as in the traits of Norsemen constant in Saxons, Englishmen, and Americans. He proclaimed the existence of permanent “traits” in halls around the country in a popular lecture called “Permanent Traits of English National Genius,” first delivered in 1835 and repeated for years to appreciative audiences.

  A SHARED fascination with Englishness allowed Emerson and his readers to overlook a lot of nonsense in his ideas. Like so much race talk, the crucial “Race” chapter in English Traits contradicts itself in tone and in word. It makes one statement and then, without a retraction, offers conflicting information. For instance, the chapter begins by dismissing the race-determinist writing of “an ingenious anatomist” (Robert Knox), who rashly decrees races to be “imperishable.” Like others before him, including Blumenbach, Emerson notes the confusion over the number of actually existing races.42 Citing Blumenbach by name, Emerson agrees that races shade into each other imperceptibly. Then, in utter contradiction, he continues to cleanly distinguish races according to their own unique traits.

  On the one hand, Emerson suspects that “the spawning force of the race” explains English imperial success. On the other hand—and this chapter contains a multitude of hands—ascribing English success to race merely flatters the English. After all, says Emerson, “Every body likes to know that his advantages cannot be attributed to air, soil, sea, or to local wealth, as mines and quarries, nor to laws and traditions, nor to fortune, but to superior brain, as it makes the praise more personal to him.” Then, on yet another hand, race actually does explain a lot:

  It is race, is it not? that puts the hundred millions of India under the dominion of a remote island in the north of Europe. Race avails much, if that be true, which is alleged, that all Celts are Catholics, and all Saxons are Protestants; that Celts love unity of power, and Saxons the representative principle. Race is a controlling influence in the Jew, who, for two millenniums, under every climate, has preserved the same character and employments. Race in the negro is of appalling importance. The French in Canada, cut off from all intercourse with the parent people, have held their national traits. I chanced to read Tacitus “on the Manners of the Germans,” not long since, in Missouri, and the heart of Illinois, and I found abundant points of resemblance between the Germans of the Hercynian forest, and our Hoosiers, Suckers, and Badgers of the American woods.

  Then, on a fifth hand, “It is easy to add to the counteracting forces to race,” such as civilization. Emerson adds in the hopelessly mixed nature of the English race, consisting not simply of Celts, Normans, and Teutons. “Who can trace them historically?” he asks, quoting Daniel Defoe to the effect that the Englishman is “the mud of all races.”43

  The true English type inhabits only a narrowly circumscribed territory: fashionable London. Coarse, provincial, and too anxious to please, the Scots harbor too many local dialects of speech. Ireland is worse: “In Ireland, are the same climate and soil as in England, but less food, no right relation to the land, political dependence, small tenantry, and an inferior or misplaced race.”44

  In the final analysis, Emerson comes out of his welter of contradiction agreeing with Robert Knox after all. In the chapter enti
tled “Character,” race determines history: “[It] is in the deep traits of race that the fortunes of nations are written, and however derived,—whether a happier tribe or mixture of tribes, the air, or what circumstance that mixed for them the golden mean of temperament,—here [in England] exists the best stock in the world, broad-fronted, broad bottomed, best for depth, range and equability….”45

  And this is where Emerson stood when he wrote English Traits in the mid-1850s. Later in the nineteenth century, scholars would trace the political genius of Saxons to the mark (land held in common by ancient Germans) or to the German forest. But for Emerson, the beautiful, bloody, virile Norsemen of the Dark Ages hold the key to American racial identity.

  AS AUTHOR of English Traits and a font of themes usually located much later in the nineteenth century, Emerson qualifies as a full contributor to white race theory. His enormous intellectual strength and prodigious output made him the source of a crucial current of thought, for he enunciated virtually all the salient nineteenth-and early twentieth-century concepts of Anglo-Saxonism. English Traits expressed the views of the most prestigious intellectual in the United States, elevating its formulation into American ideology. The American was the same as the Englishman, who was the same as the Saxon and the Norseman. Thus “Saxon” supplied the key word exiling the Celtic Irish—white though they may be—from American identity. Wrenching his Saxon away from Blumenbach’s female beauty, Emerson created a white racial ideal that was both virile and handsome. Towering over his age, he spoke for an increasingly rich and powerful American ruling class. His thinking, as they say, became hegemonic.

  12

  EMERSON IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN WHITE PEOPLE

  It hardly seems necessary to underline Emerson’s importance in nineteenth-century American culture. One of his well-read contemporaries expressed this esteem: “I think Mr. Emerson is the greatest man—the most complete man that ever lived…. He is indeed a ‘supernal vision.’ I often think that God and his holy angels must regard him with delight.”1* Another described him as “the most American of our writers,” the embodiment of “the Idea of America, which lies at the bottom of our original institutions”—views that resonate still.2 While so many of his nineteenth-century peers calibrated their thought according to the Bible, Emerson read everything and translated it into recognizable American terms. His enrichment of American intellectual life turned the phrase “Ralph Waldo Emerson” into a summary of Victorian America’s intellectual history.

  Emerson expressed the best of his age, albeit in the most restrained terms. Looking kindly upon progressive reform, he denounced the barbarism he saw in American slavery and befriended a woman, Margaret Fuller, one of the smartest people of her generation.* Truly, Emerson cemented the identification of liberal, antislavery New England with American intellect, while the luxury of his language—its very wealth of allusion and nuance—amazes readers to this day.3 Much of his popularity grew out of his ability to mirror and to orchestrate the thinking of his age: as a mirror, he reflected back familiar notions already accepted, if only tacitly, by educated Americans; as an orchestrator, he arranged simple thoughts into elaborate, memorable performances. His every note seemingly rang true. But did it?

  It is important to notice that when Emerson said “American,” he meant male white people of a certain socioeconomic standing—his. Without his saying so directly, his definition of American excluded non-Christians and virtually all poor whites. Native American Indians and African Americans did not count. In English Traits, when he tallies up the American population, Emerson explicitly excludes the enslaved and skips over native peoples entirely.4

  On the whole, Emerson’s engagement with Saxon racial identity simply shut out all else. Certainly, insofar as race connects to blackness and slavery, Emerson remains outside the ranks of racial thinkers. Many others of the time were obsessed by color, but Emerson had little to say about black people. What he did say, with the exception of “Voluntaries,” a poem commemorating the Civil War exploits of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Colored Troops, lacks sentiments of brotherhood.5

  Musings in the journals—unpublished while he lived—are mostly what we have to judge. In the mid-1840s, before his views had hardened, Emerson preferred abstractions to empathy, on the theory that only ideas could “save races.” He remained unsure, he said, of the ultimate worth of the Negro race: “[I]f the black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new & coming civilization, for the sake of that element no wrong nor strength nor circumstance can hurt him, he will survive & play his part.” However, “if the black man is feeble & not important to the existing races, not on a par with the best race, the black man must serve & be sold & exterminated.”6 Thus the black man, a notion rather than an individual, remains a plaything of the forces of history.

  Such confusion is not lessened by the fact that Emerson hated slavery, especially the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. His excoriation of the law and of New Englanders who supported it takes up more space in his journals than any other political issue: eighty-six manuscript pages in his journal for 1851.7 But, like that of Thomas Jefferson, for instance, Emerson’s disapproval of slavery in no way reflected racial egalitarianism. Rather, it connected to his sense of civilization: he considered slavery a relic of barbarism that was bad for civilization, that is, bad for his kind of white people. He harbored no doubt that American indulgence of slaveholders threatened the United States as a whole: “The absence of moral feeling in the country whiteman is the very calamity I deplore,” he notes in 1851, adding a chilling denouement: “The loss of captivity of a thousand negroes is nothing to me.”8

  Neither, by the mid-1850s, did it perturb Emerson that black people and Indians might become extinct; on the contrary, their eventual disappearance would improve the human race by widening the gap between “man & beast!” The black man “is created on a lower plane than the white, & eats men & kidnaps & tortures, if he can. The Negro is reactionary imitative, secondary, in short, reactionary merely in his successes, & there is no origination with him in mental & moral sphere.”9

  Occasional nameless black figures do appear fleetingly in the journals. One instance corroborates the multiracial nature of Emerson’s Concord: his mention in 1845 of a heterogeneous church meeting where “the whole various extremes of our little village society were for once brought together. Black & white, poet & grocer, contractor & lumberman, Methodist & preacher joined with the regular congregation in rare union.”10 If race means blackness, Emerson plays the tiniest part in American intellectual history, although quite a callous one. Proud of his ability to deliver unsentimental realism in the face of a racial hierarchy decreed by natural law, Emerson deviates only briefly from his concept of permanent racial hierarchy. But ever so briefly he did deviate.

  In the mid-1840s, Know-Nothing xenophobia and mob violence troubled Emerson, setting off a flirtation with the idea of hybridity. In an often quoted journal entry he moves to praise multiculturalism, envisioning a new America forged from all the different constituents that make up this new country:

  …in this Continent,—asylum of all nations, the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, & the Cossacks, & all the European tribes,—of the Africans, & of the Polynesians, will construct a new race, a new religion, a new State, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting pot of the Dark Ages, or that which earlier emerged from the Pelasgic [ancient Greek] & Etruscan barbarism. La Nature aime les croisements.11

  Emerson’s reputation for ethnic-racial broadmindedness rests largely upon this generous and virtually unique statement of American identity.12 Nowhere else, however, did he welcome multicultural America so warmly, despite occasional doodlings about mixture and “crossings” (usually phrased in French). His journals for 1847 contain five statements on mixture: “La Nature aime les Croisments,” “Crosiements,” “Croisment,” twice, and “Nature loved crosses, and inoculations of barbarous races prove: and
marriage is crossing.”13 But there was nothing sustained, no sentence even completed.

  WHEN RACE means white blood, however, Emerson surges to the fore.14 Since his views were already circulating in the United States and Great Britain, Emerson cannot be seen as an originator. He was what we might nowadays call an enabler. Nonetheless, by phrasing bromides in his learned and graceful prose, he endowed them with his own substantial intellectual prestige. No matter how contradictory and obtuse, they circulated as American orthodoxy.

  With the rare exception of the Fugitive Slave Act, Emerson paid scant attention to any of the historical processes that spawned hardship and political upheaval. To him history served as racial prologue—as the opening scenes in a drama rather than as events that affected people’s relation to one another. Economic classes existed as though decreed by Fate, not as outcomes of human interaction. Therefore, poor people, especially poor white people, native and immigrant, remain at the periphery of Emerson’s field of vision. By the late 1850s, Emerson deemed an array of the poor to be poor by inherent nature. The Irish and others in the antebellum working class (the Jews, Italians, and Greeks of the turn of the twentieth century had not yet arrived in massive numbers), whom he called “guano,” were fated by race to play dismal roles in a mechanistic world.