The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  Fig. 17.2. Edward A. Ross.

  Like other declarations on race, “The Causes of Racial Superiority” contradicts itself from one statement to the next. Ross opens by denigrating the old-fashioned concept of race as “the watchword of the vulgar.” What the craniometricians measure—head shape as a racial trait—interested him not at all. Ross’s racial characteristics are temperamental: “climatic adaptability,” “energy,” “self-reliance,” “foresight,” “stability of character,” and “pride of blood.”12 These were the concepts to focus on.

  In page after page, Ross beats his drum: “the Celtic and Mediterranean races,” “domesticated races” and “economic races,” “the higher races,” “the great races,” “the higher blood,” “the Superior Race” with capital letters, and, echoing Emerson’s “singing and dancing nations,” “the childishness or frivolousness of the cheaply-gotten-up, mañana races.” “The economic virtues,” he concludes in italics, “are a function of race.”13* All this appears in a lecture aimed at an audience of scholars of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

  Writing for a popular audience in the Independent, Ross echoes Emerson’s and Roosevelt’s image of American pioneers as Vikings, selected “not for the brainiest or noblest or highest bred” but for the “strongest and most energetic.”14 Like Ripley and the Teutonists, Ross prizes height and denigrates by name the people he thinks too short. Sardinians did not make the cut, nor did those “masses of fecund but beaten humanity from the hovels of far Lombardy and Galicia,” and “cheap stucco manikins from Southeastern Europe…from Croatia and Dalmatia and Sicily and Armenia, they throng to us, the beaten members of beaten breeds…Slovaks and Syrians…as undersized in spirit, no doubt, as they are in body.”15

  Finally, willing to use any weapon at hand, Ross accepts the reasoning of then fashionable, self-styled European “anthroposociologists,” physical anthropologists Otto Ammon and Georges Vacher de Lapouge, who bent Darwinian natural selection to their mania of craniometry and had also made their way into William Z. Ripley’s influential Races of Europe. Ammon and Lapouge were spinning out fantastical theories of race temperament based on the cephalic index, famously pronouncing European townspeople more long-headed (meaning, for them, more Teutonic and superior) than the people of the surrounding countryside (those more Celto-Slav and inferior). Following them, Ross concludes that the “city is a magnet for the more venturesome, and it draws to it more of the long-skulled race than of the broad-skulled race…. [T]he Teuton’s superior migrancy takes him to the foci of prosperity, and procures him a higher reward and a higher social status.” For someone dismissing race as superstition, Ross bought right into the mumbo jumbo of racial skull shapes.16*

  In lockstep with Ross, Roosevelt opined, “If all our nice friends in Beacon Street, and Newport, and Fifth Avenue, and Philadelphia, have one child, or no child at all, while all the Finnegans, Hooligans, Antonios, Mandelbaums and Rabinskis have eight, or nine, or ten—it’s simply a question of the multiplication table. How are you going to get away from it?”17 But Roosevelt did not have the public sphere to himself. While he was nagging educated women of “our own type” to bear babies, a less articulate, but nonetheless oppositional, discourse arose that undercut his fundamental assumptions. Worker-oriented commentary, especially (but not exclusively) in the foreign-language press, disputed both the notion of upper-class racial superiority and the logic of racial determinism. Their point was well taken, for the so-called beaten men from beaten races were doing most of the work. In the garment, iron, and steel industries, in the mines and mills that kept the amazing American economy running, immigrants supplied the necessary brawn. The rhetoric flowing from the country’s Roosevelts and the Rosses might harp on race—the Italian race, the Jewish or Hebrew race, the Anglo-Saxon race. Such blather only obscured—in words, at least—the gaping chasm between the classes, and the working classes were beginning to have their say.

  THE INDUSTRIAL Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies), founded in 1905, became the most visible sign of working-class mobilization. Repudiating the American Federation of Labor’s business model of organizing only skilled workers (now monopolized by English-speaking northwestern Europeans, especially Irish Americans), the IWW welcomed all kinds with an “industrial” model that sought to bring the unskilled, immigrant masses into unions by stressing their interests as workers.18*

  With their working-class readership, Italian and Yiddish newspapers came to reflect the anarchist and socialist views of their readers. The earliest Italian and Yiddish newspapers sprang up in New York in the 1880s, with the left press appearing in the following decade. The anarchist Il Proletario was founded in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1902, as the organ of the Italian Socialist Federation, joining the socialist Jewish Daily Forward founded in 1897. Such papers depicted American society quite differently from the tony journals that couched their race theory in quasi-scientific, quasi-historical terms.

  Italian anarchists especially heaped scorn on American self-righteous blindness, above all when it came to injustices inflicted on blacks in the South. True, other immigrant workers had become targets of labor abuse, but Italians had suffered a special wound, the lynching of eleven Italians in New Orleans in 1891. As though to echo David Walker’s 1835 accusations, Il Proletario skipped over the idea of white races and stressed the injustices of black Americans at the hands of native-born whites. A blast from Il Proletario in 1909 asked,

  Who do they think they are as a race, these arrogant whites? From where do they think they come? The blacks are at least a race, but the whites…how many of them are bastards? How much mixing is their “pure” blood? And how many kisses have their women asked for from the strong and virile black servants? As have they, the white males, desired to enjoy the warm pleasures of the black women of the sensual lips and sinuous bodily movements? But the white knights care little for the honor and decency of the black women, whom they use and abuse as they please. For these, race hatred is a national duty.

  Sounding a note that grew louder and louder, Il Proletario reached a ringing conclusion: “Not race struggle but class struggle.”19

  BUT IT was too early, and Il Proletario’s exhortation fell on ears attuned to another sort of analysis, one that interpreted class status as permanent racial difference with African Americans largely cornered in the South; the “race” in this race question was as much white as black.

  18

  THE DISCOVERY OF DEGENERATE FAMILIES

  As the nineteenth century drew to a close, American race theory had settled into a four and a half part scheme. On top, where they had been since Emerson, were the stout, pure, and admirable Anglo-Saxons. Catholics—Irish and German—were on their way into the club of the select as northern Europeans. A separate category contained the European “beaten men of beaten races.” Swarthy and round-headed, they were easy enough to see, for recent European scholarship guided Americans into the science that found them inferior. Black people—segregated, impoverished, and disfranchised—generated a good deal of southern commentary, but for the majority, they quite obviously did not—could not—be included within the American. American Indians and Asians, largely disappeared from racial calculation.

  So far, so good for the theorists, but what was to be done with the poor whites, those unsavory millions of native-born Anglo-Saxons? Many of them were drifters or hunters or hardscrabble farmers living out in the country—often in the South—or scratching a livelihood on the edges of town. Anglo-Saxon of race, but manifestly inferior in lifestyle, they did not fit into the American racial plan. They needed to be put into a racial box and theorists found one: “degenerate families.”

  HIGH-MINDED RICHARD L. Dugdale laid the cornerstone of the “degenerate family” edifice.1 Born in England, Dugdale (1841–83) lived on an inheritance in New York City and served as corresponding secretary of the Prison Association of New York and secretary of the National Prison Association in the 1870s. He was a man
described as “so quiet, so modest, so full of love for all men…engaged not only in the cause of prison reform, but in all the great reforms that made themselves felt in his day and generation…[and] much attached to his sister, Jane Margaret, an invalid. He was never attracted to other women, and was very shy and retiring in their presence.” Dugdale therefore heads the long list of men anxious about bad heredity (including Francis Galton, Henry H. Goddard, Madison Grant, and Charles Benedict Davenport) who never had children of their own.2 After Dugdale died at age forty-two, his sister, Jane Margaret, established the Richard L. Dugdale Fund for the Promotion in the United States of Sound Political Knowledge and Opinions.” She died a year later.*

  For some years Dugdale had been concerned with prisons. Then the hard times following the panic of 1873 aggravated social conditions. Two European criminologists, Cesare Lombroso and Martino Beltrani-Scalia, had recently taken up the scientific study of crime “in its perpetrators” in order to formulate means of prevention. Their work attracted Dugdale, who sought to apply their recommendations in New York State.3 In 1874 he visited thirteen county jails and in 1877 published his report analyzing the inmates as “The Jukes”: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity, also Further Studies of Criminals. A resounding success, it was reprinted five times by 1895.

  A multitude of tables lent an aura of reliability to the data. Dugdale described not only particular individuals but also a type of family as a huge social problem. In seventy-five years, by Dugdale’s calculation, the 1,200 “Jukes” (a pseudonym) had cost the state of New York $1,308,000, “without reckoning the cash paid for whiskey, or taking into account the entailment of pauperism and crime of the survivors in succeeding generations and the incurable disease, idiocy and insanity growing out of this debauchery, and reaching further than we can calculate.”4 This entire malediction, according to Dugdale, stemmed largely—though not entirely—from defective heredity.

  Trying to pin down the provenance of such a dire outcome, Dugdale traces the Jukes’ descent back to a “jolly and companionable,” hard-drinking, early eighteenth-century ancestor named Max, a person with no last name who lived by hunting, fishing, and casual labor. Max sired children aplenty “some of them almost certainly illegitimate.” The pseudonym “Juke” comes from the family of sisters Max’s sons married, a family Dugdale also suspects of illegitimacy.

  This tale of crime, pauperism, and consanguinity Dugdale presents not “as a generalization” but as hard facts supporting dramatic conclusions:

  In other words, fornication, either consanguineous or not, is the backbone of their habits, flanked on one side by pauperism, on the other by crime. The secondary features are prostitution, with its compliment of bastardy, and its resultant neglected and miseducated childhood; exhaustion, with its complement intemperance and its resultant unbalanced minds; and disease with its complement extinction.5

  The text, replete with mentions of Juke “blood” and “stock,” dedicates many pages to “harlotry” as “the distinctive tendency of the Juke family.” The foremost cause of “hereditary pauperism” is disease, and the “most common” disease among the Jukes is syphilis, which, according to the shy little Dugdale, ignorant male Jukes regard as a sign of virility.6

  What, then, was to be done about the Jukes and their ilk? Following Lombroso and Beltrani-Scalia, Dugdale offers solutions: solid industrial training for skills, industriousness, and chastity would be good steps, but most important would be the removal of the Juke children from their own degenerate homes into good families.7 Although torn between “THE HEREDITY” and “THE ENVIRONMENT” as determinants of criminality, Dugdale favors heredity. Despite his vision of environment as a means of mitigating bad heredity, readers drew more emphatic conclusions. In the wake of “The Jukes,” nature overshadowed nurture in the creation of degenerate families, and the way toward drastic measures began to open.

  After the 1877 publication of “The Jukes,” a kind of quiet standoff prevailed between the two camps of nature and nurture. They agreed that hereditary weakness in poor whites was a serious, even endemic problem. But differences surfaced among proposals for dealing with it. Those favoring correction through training and resettlement made some headway, as in the case of another wealthy New York social reformer, Josephine Shaw Lowell (1843–1905).

  In 1879 Lowell seized upon Dugdale’s depiction of Juke family harlotry.* If harlotry, poverty, and illegitimacy were inherited products of weak-mindedness, then weak-mindedness itself must not be allowed to breed. In a real sense, Lowell put herself in the place of the state, calling “promiscuous and criminalistic” women carriers of a “deadly poison,” which they passed on “even to the third and fourth generations.” Lowell went on to indict charity organizations, accusing them of allowing “men and women who are diseased and vicious to reproduce their kind.”8 The thought took hold and led to Lowell’s creation of the Custodial Asylum for Feeble-Minded Women, in Newark, New York (not New Jersey), designed to prevent mentally handicapped young women from having children.

  Thus began what is called “negative eugenics,” a system seeking to prevent a class of people from reproducing. Meanwhile, Theodore Roosevelt got busy encouraging motherhood among his own superior stocks, an approach counted as “positive eugenics.” Though controversial on account of its expense in the late 1870s, the custodial asylum remained a remedy of choice. By the late 1880s fourteen states housed fifteen institutions caring for over four thousand children.9 But far less gentle approaches to Americans widely considered dysgenic were coming under review.

  LET US remember that social reformers like Richard Dugdale and Josephine Shaw Lowell meant to do just that—reform the social landscape by focusing on families they considered hereditarily degenerate and, therefore, a threat to the well-being of society in general. As Christians, they meant first to do good. If scientific validity lay on their side, then so much the better, as a means of gaining support for eugenic remedies. Dugdale’s “The Jukes” had reaped an abundant harvest among penologists and social workers as well as among “social gospelers” whose humanitarian commitment to the poor could not be doubted.

  One such, Oscar Carleton McCulloch (1843–91), an influential student of hereditary degeneracy, drew his initial inspiration directly from “The Jukes.” (See figure 18.1, Oscar McCulloch.) His research on a large, itinerant Indiana family slid so easily into the literature of eugenics and social welfare as to became another classic.

  McCulloch had been a traveling salesman before forsaking commerce for religion. After graduating from the Chicago Theological Seminary in 1870, he made his way to the Plymouth Congregational Church in Indianapolis in 1877, the very year Dugdale’s “Jukes” appeared. In Plymouth Church, McCulloch welcomed all sorts of people, offered lectures and classes, and even created a savings and loan institution to meet a variety of needs. Here was a go-getter, and reformers from throughout Indiana flocked to McCulloch and made his church a center of Christian charity.10 Popularity did not suffice for McCulloch, who longed for theoretical justification for his good works. Inspired by Dugdale’s example, he set out to place his own philanthropy on a more scientific basis by pursuing, over a decade, deep research on the Indiana poor.

  An impoverished family, more especially its “pauper history of several generations,” provided an excellent case study. In The Tribe of Ishmael: A Study in Social Degradation (1889), McCulloch traced the family back to early English settlers migrating from Virginia into Kentucky and southern Indiana. Here, though unquestionably English, lay a different sort of heritage, for the “Ishmaelites” descended from the wrong English blood. Ishmaelite ancestors came from “the old convict stock which England threw into this country in the seventeenth century,” a great tide of antisocial men and lewd women shipped out of England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.* McCulloch’s science proved lasting. In “The Tribe of Ishmael” of 1923, the eugenicist Arthur H. Estabrook brought McCulloch’s findings from the 1880s up to d
ate: “The men were shiftless; the women, immoral, and the children, ill-fed and clothed, the typical feeble-minded people who are so easily recognized today.”11 (See figure 18.2, Arthur Estabrook’s illustrations of the Ishmaelites.)

  Fig. 18.1. Oscar McCulloch, frontispiece, The Open Door: Sermons and Prayers by Oscar C. McCulloch (1892).

  Fig. 18.2. “The Tribe of Ishmael: a group of degenerates found in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa—with individual photos and captions.”

  McCulloch figured that bad heredity had endowed the Ishmaelites with three outstanding traits: “pauperism, licentiousness and gypsying.” They refused steady work, he said, preferring to vagabond, beg, steal, and breed; “general unchastity” characterized them. “The prostitution and illegitimacy are large, the tendency shows itself in incests [sic], and relations lower than the animals go.” Following his logic, McCulloch concluded that “so-called charity” merely encouraged the Ishmaelites’ parasitism on society and should not, therefore, be offered.12 The environment no longer contributes to the problem, as with Dugdale’s Jukes. Now “degradation” and “parasitism” spring from the fatal combination of bad heredity and wrongheaded charity. The bad-blood theory was not new.

  Poor people actually had been shipped to British North America during the colonial era, and the label of criminal was broad. As we have seen, British and Irish street children, the homeless, criminals, and indentured servants accounted for a sizable percentage of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century settlers, especially in Virginia. Great numbers of these forced immigrants actually had committed small-time thievery, the petty crimes of poverty, such as stealing food or flitching a pig. For others, the crime, so to speak, lay only in being poor or vulnerable to the kidnapping for export that amounted to organized crime.13