The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  Twelve years later, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, a book that conquered biology and changed science forever. But Darwin did not conquer Agassiz, who, famously, never accepted Darwin’s concept of evolutionary change. To his very end, Agassiz preferred a polygenesist scheme in which God had created the races separately at the very beginning. Even so, with the founding of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, Agassiz presided over a scholarly institution of enormous influence. For twenty-six years, until his death, he shaped not only the world of American natural history museums but also the field of American anthropology, which natural history museums housed until well into the twentieth century. This legacy he passed on to his Harvard protégé and successor, the Kentuckian Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (1841–1906).

  Shaler became a fixture at Harvard during the 1870s, often referring to Agassiz as “my master.” As a professor of geology, paleontology, and scientific truth in general, Shaler taught a generation of men destined to lead the United States, including Theodore Roosevelt. Through his commentary on American life, Shaler’s Anglo-Saxon chauvinism provided a bulwark to the New England–based movement against immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Today, after the mid-twentieth-century reshuffling of race into a black/white binary, Shaler appears in history as a proponent of black inferiority. But in the 1880s and 1890s, he also—and mainly—helped elevate the figure of the white male Kentuckian into an emblem of America and took aim at southern and eastern European immigrants as menaces to American racial integrity.

  THE AMERICAN school of anthropology faded after the publication of its masterworks in the 1850s.18 One of its core tenets—that different races constitute different species and stemmed from several separate racial creations (polygenesis)—lost a good deal of credibility with the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. But its racist notions served the needs of American culture too well to disappear entirely. Indeed, the American school’s founding belief in permanent and unchanging racial identity has yet to expire.

  By the early 1890s, the American leaders in anthropology—Morton, Nott, Agassiz—had done their work and passed from the scene. White race taxonomy was, in any case, evolving into notions of immigration restriction and eugenics. Samuel George Morton had died at fifty-two in 1851; following Confederate service and disappointment with the post-slavery South, Nott died in 1873, the same year as Louis Agassiz. After a long cognitive decline, Agassiz’s friend Emerson died in 1882, as did Gobineau.

  They left behind a dour legacy: the fetishization of tall, pale, blond, beautiful Anglo-Saxons; a fascination with skulls and head measurements; the drawing of racial lines and the fixing of racial types; the ranking of races along a single “evolutionary” line of development; and a preoccupation with sex, reproduction, and sexual attractiveness. All this proved not only durable but also applicable to people now considered white.

  14

  THE SECOND ENLARGEMENT OF AMERICAN WHITENESS

  Tempting though it may be to cling to a simple history of whiteness stretching back through American history, our task here is to reveal the historical record, where we find a far more complex story. Rather than a single, enduring definition of whiteness, we find multiple enlargements occurring against a backdrop of the black/white dichotomy.

  Any nation founded by slaveholders finds justification for its class system, and American slavery made the inherent inferiority of black people a foundational belief, which nineteenth-century Americans rarely disputed. Very few believed that people of African descent belonged within the figure of the American. At the same time, Americans rarely excluded Europeans from the classification of “white,” especially when it came to politics and voting. After property qualifications for voting ended in the first half of the nineteenth century—the first enlargement of American whiteness—virtually all male Europeans and their free male children could be naturalized and vote as white. Thus, matters of legal American race remained relatively clear as a question of black/white, especially in the South. “Southerner” meant white southerner; “American” required whiteness, but mere whiteness might not suffice in society. Although determining who counted as “white” for political purposes was clear, whiteness in and of itself got one only so far toward being part of the American.

  As we have seen, enormous efforts went into enthroning the Teutonic/Saxon/Anglo-Saxons, tracing them back to a tough Germanic-Scandinavian strain, conquerors of old, never themselves conquered. This heroic depiction left out a gaggle of Celts: those millions of French, Irish, and northern Scots and their children who were assumed to lack Saxon blood. In the mid-nineteenth century, it was mostly Irish Catholics who raised the issue. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, they were not deeply, truly Americans. Nor were certain Catholic and Jewish Germans. In this sense, Emerson’s time was passing.

  THE CIVIL War offered a huge opening. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants volunteered for military service on both sides. Not surprisingly, the Union Army, about one-fourth of whose personnel came from abroad, benefited from immigrant support more than the Confederacy. Some immigrants were well integrated into heterogeneous Union forces as Irish and Germans scattered throughout a panoply of regiments. In addition, and quite shrewdly, the Union Army organized itself along national lines. Among its thirty-six Irish units were the New York Fighting Sixty-ninth, the Irish Zouaves, the Irish Volunteers, and the St. Patrick Brigade. Italians made up the Garibaldi Guards and the Italian Legion. The eighty-four German units included the Steuben Volunteers, the German Rifles, and the Turner Rifles.1 Confederates looked askance at the Union’s polyglot ranks, and for decades afterwards Civil War Decoration Day holidays offered embittered former Confederates occasions to characterize their side as “American” and to impugn the Union Army as “made up largely of foreigners and blacks fighting for pay.”2

  Conversely, former Unionists—and most Democrats—saw immigrants’ service as a multicultural victory over Know-Nothing nativism. According to one minister, the children of the dead, thanks to the sacrifice of their immigrant fathers, are “no longer strangers and foreigners, but are, by this baptism of blood…consecrated citizens of America forever.”3 Union Decoration Day oratory projected the sunny side of wartime immigrant Americanization, helping to usher hundreds of thousands into the white American club. Such a view, however, was far from universal. The Republican Party and its media spokesmen initially saw such easy Irish Americanization as little more than another facet of traditional, Democratic, proslavery white supremacy.

  The extremely popular and influential Harper’s Weekly and its brilliant German cartoonist Thomas Nast (1840–1902) led the charge. Siding with southern black Republicans against northern Irish Democrats, Nast appropriated a caricature long popular in England week after week. He depicted Irishmen as brutal, drunken apes—rioting on St. Patrick’s Day, overturning Reconstruction in the South, and cynically crashing their way into American politics as white men. By allying with former Confederates and fat-cat northern Democrats, Irishmen were said to be trampling the rights of loyal black southern defenders of the Union. To Nast, Irish opportunity meant the black man’s defeat. Of course, both opportunity and defeat had taught the Irish how politics worked in America. Race, in black and white terms, retained its importance. (But race did not matter above all. No women could vote.)

  Consider Nast’s 1868 cartoon. (See figure 14.1, “This Is a White Man’s Government.”) A stereotypical Irishman on the left swears allegiance to the Confederate (CSA on his belt buckle) in the middle, with Horatio Seymour, a New York Democrat plutocrat, holding graft money, on the right.* The Irishman’s shillelagh reads “a vote,” referring to a tendency of Irish immigrants to vote the Democratic ticket and, presumably, thereby to undermine true American values. The Irishman’s hat saying “5 points” recalls the bloody Saint Patrick’s Day riot of 1867 in New York City’s biggest slum.† Behind the Irishman, a building in flames, the “Colored Orphan Asylum,” refers to its destruction by an
Irish mob during the deadly 1863 draft riots. Together, these three figures trample the loyal black American veteran, whose Union soldier’s hat and American flag lie in the dust, the ballot box beyond his reach. Nast’s only half-ironic caption reads, “This Is a White Man’s Government.”

  Fig. 14.1. Thomas Nast, “This Is a White Man’s Government,” Harper’s Weekly, 1868.

  Without a doubt, Nast’s cartoon reflects a good deal of reality. Irish workers had shown little hesitation in brandishing their new-found whiteness as a tool against others. In the West of the 1880s, Irish workingmen agitated as “white men” to drive Chinese workers off their jobs and out of their homes. This anti-Chinese movement produced the country’s first race-based immigration legislation, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Although not all Chinese immigrants fell under the law—merchants, teachers, students, diplomats, and other professionals were exempted—the Irish and other whites continued to attack the Chinese in a series of western pogroms called the “Driving Out.”4 As it would again, “racial” violence addressed economic competition.

  In the 1870s and 1880s, politics began to serve the economic interests of Irish and German immigrants in many walks of American life. The right to vote, for instance, opened a path to employment through government patronage and civil service jobs. Labor union control meant that their sons and brothers stood first in line for steady work and, later, skilled jobs. The figure of the Irish policeman owes its longevity to this system of public employment. Thanks to patronage jobs and government contracts, fewer in the second and third generations suffered the grinding poverty that had dogged their famine immigrant ancestors. Along the way they learned, in true American fashion of the time, to profit from the vulnerability of nonwhite Americans barred from voting—hence barred from the fruits of bloc voting.5 Color mattered, even for Ralph Waldo Emerson, that preeminent Saxonist.

  EMERSON HAD his contradictions, of course. In English Traits of 1856, he both denounced and embraced racial determination. In Conduct of Life of 1860, he again both deprecated and then echoed the racist views of Robert Knox, describing the “German and Irish millions, like the Negro,” as races with “a great deal of guano in their destiny.”6 Ever a Saxon chauvinist, Emerson could nonetheless soften toward poor immigrants, presumably Irish, provided their bodies were sufficiently light in color. In 1851 Emerson cast his eye on the newcomers around him, judging them, in most cases, as suitable to join his world.

  America. Emigration.

  In the distinctions of the genius of the American race it is to be considered, that, it is not indiscriminate masses of Europe, that are transported shipped hitherward, but the Atlantic is a sieve through which only or chiefly the liberal adventurous sensitive America-loving part of each city, clan, family, are brought. It is the light complexion, the blue eyes of Europe that come: the black eyes, the black drop, the Europe of Europe is left.7

  For Emerson, as for his admirers, it was the blue eyes and the light complexion that conferred on the Irish a real-American identity. With the arrival of millions of dark-eyed new immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century, his preferences counted ever more heavily.

  As many immigrants poured into the United States, a new hierarchy was under construction, one placing Anglo-Saxons at the top and the Irish just below, soon to be incorporated into the upper stratum of northwestern Europeans as “Nordics.” The newest newcomers, Slavic immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian empire, Jews from Russia and Poland, and Italians, especially those from south of Rome, had still to be judged and rated. This sorting out took place within a history of older waves of immigration.

  Back in the mid-nineteenth century, masses of impoverished Catholics had inspired contrasts between “old” and “new” immigrants. The Texas founding father Sam Houston had contrasted the old immigration of the colonial generation, on the one hand, and the new, midcentury Catholics, on the other. Now, at the turn of the twentieth century, Catholic Irish and Germans were assuming their place as “old” immigrants, while the “new” immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were being slotted where Houston’s famine Irish had been. In their penury and apparent strangeness, the new immigrants after 1880 made Irish and Germans immigrants and, especially, their more prosperous, better-educated descendants seem acceptably American.

  Thus occurred the second great enlargement of American whiteness. It came with such reluctance and with so many qualifications and insults that Irish Americans continued to feel excluded and aggrieved. It took a very long time for the realization of acceptance to sink in, for it had begun in the middle of the nineteenth century and stretched across the lifetimes of a generation and more. The commentary was far more likely to castigate new immigrants than to welcome the old. In the great hue and cry over this new round of immigration, the voice of one New Englander carried farthest.

  IN THE 1890s, Francis Amasa Walker (1840–97), the most admired American economist and statistician of his time, laid the scientific groundwork by publishing a number of influential articles positing the need to limit the number of immigrants. (See figure 14.2, Francis Amasa Walker.) The son of a professor of economics who also served in the U.S. Congress, Walker graduated from Amherst College in 1860 and rose through Union Army ranks during the Civil War. After studies in Germany, he was appointed director of the U.S. census of 1870. He directed the census of 1880 while attached to the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University between 1872 and 1880. In 1881 he became president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in the following years presided over both the American Statistical Association and the American Economic Association (AEA). Until the creation of the Nobel Prize in economics in 1969, the AEA’s annual Walker Prize stood as the world’s highest honor accorded an economist. Having been born in Boston, moreover, Walker was almost automatically deemed smart, able, and enterprising. Who better than a Bostonian to tell Americans what they needed to know? And Walker had some help.

  The idea of New England, as we have seen, played a pivotal role in American race thought. Ostensibly a regional identity, New England stood for racial Englishness—vide English Traits. In this sense, the writing of American history bristled with race talk, as the Brahmin author and congressman Henry Cabot Lodge showed in his well-regarded books.

  Lodge was an expert on Anglo-Saxon law, the topic of his Harvard Ph.D. dissertation. By 1881 he had taught at Harvard for three years and was starting his political career, sped along through a series of lectures at the Lowell Institute (where we have already seen Louis Agassiz) and publication of his 560-page Short History of the English Colonies in America. A perfect specimen of Anglo chauvinism, this book ascribes the greatness of the United States to the “sound English stock” of the middle classes and the “fine English stock” of families like George Washington’s, “good specimens of the nationality to which they belonged, and…a fine, sturdy, manly race.”8 Again and again, Lodge trumpets the qualities of “the English race” and bases the inevitability of American independence on the intrinsic worthiness of that race.

  Fig. 14.2. Francis Amasa Walker as president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  Ten years later, Lodge confidently presented supposedly hard proof of New Englanders’ superiority, in an article quoted approvingly for the next forty years. “The Distribution of Ability in the United States” (1891) quantified the conventional wisdom of the time in pages of tables and lists purporting to prove that Massachusetts had contributed the largest number of distinguished Americans: 2,686 of the 14,243 names in the six volumes of Appleton’s Enyclopædia of American Biography. Lodge’s methodology, with its subtle means of inclusion, worked fine for just about everybody in the race business, despite glaring weaknesses. For one thing, he gauged distinction according to the size of subjects’ portraits, so that a larger illustration in Enyclopædia of American Biography garnered two stars, while a smaller one got only one star, even after Lodge admitted that “portraits do not appear to have been distributed simply on
the ground of ability and eminence.” For another, while forthrightly acknowledging the impossibility of figuring “race-extraction” with any confidence and tracing it only through the paternal line, he nonetheless continued to use racial categories based upon names and places of birth.9 Never mind these limitations; Lodge still carried on to recognize the English as the greatest American “upbuilders.”

  As for southerners, Lodge found them deficient, even though “no finer people ever existed than those who settled and built up our Southern States.” The problem was slavery, which “dwarfed ability and retarded terribly the advance of civilization.”* Southerners got shut out of regional greatness, but Lodge’s summary, in a crucial gesture of inclusion, reached beyond England to include “people who came from other parts of Great Britain and Ireland.”10 New England still ruled, but the Irish now took their place within its glory.

  AS IN the case of so many immigration restrictionists, Francis Amasa Walker’s New England descent seemed connected to his blood and virility. In 1923 Walker’s biographer called this father of six children the “fine flowering of all that was superior and, in the best sense, peculiar in New England before the Civil War.” Echoing a familiar theme of purity, the biography claims that Walker’s “ancestry was extraordinarily homogeneous. Almost all [his] forebears came over in the first great wave of English immigration before 1650, and there was afterwards little or no admixture from other than British stock.”11 New England identity meant smart minds in handsome bodies, the sine qua non of Americanism. But would there be enough of them?