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Chapter 2

“All Things Lawful Are Not Expedient”: The American Political Science Association Considers Jim Crow

For all John W. Burgess’s influence, his elaborate theoretical edifice did not long survive intact, and elements of it were subject to challenge even as he remained the discipline’s leading figure. One of the sharpest such challenges came as early as 1891 from future U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. At the time, Wilson was newly teaching jurisprudence and political economy at Princeton University, having completed his studies under Herbert Baxter Adams at Johns Hopkins and published his thesis, Congressional Government, to wide acclaim.¹ Wilson took unpitying aim at Burgess in a review of Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law in the Atlantic Monthly. The review blasted everything from the older man’s “mechanical” style to his “extraordinary dogmatic readiness to force many intricate and diverse things to accommodate themselves to a few simple formulas.” If that weren’t enough, Wilson continued that it was “characteristic of [Burgess] to have no doubts; to him the application of his analysis seem[ed] the perfect and final justification of it.” Burgess’s “thoughtful readers,” Wilson predicted, would “experience much more difficulty and have many more doubts.”²

Wilson’s screed signaled what would shortly become a pervasive critique of Burgess’s mode of political science. Wilson and like-minded scholars, such as Henry Jones Ford, Albert Shaw, Frank Goodnow, and others seeking to further professionalize the discipline in the early twentieth century, found Burgess-style political science to be legalistic and unmoored from any empirical foundation. They also affirmed that the past, so central to Teutonism, was an inadequate guide to the rapidly shifting world they sought to understand. That new world might not be as desired, but the old one could not be recovered. Nor did it hold the keys to the future. As Leo Stanton Rowe was to exhort in 1897, a modern, scientific study of politics would have to come to terms with “new relations” whether one liked them or not.³

All the same, none of these scholars rejected Burgess’s racialism. Wilson’s work was typical in this respect. Wilson sought to move away from the older man’s idealist, historicist intellectual style but maintained many of Burgess’s fundamental precepts, including a racialized conception of the collective shaping and authorizing government. (Indeed, his one concession to Burgess in the 1891 review was that Burgess’s formulation of “the state” as the “more enduring … entity …, which gives to the government its form and vitality” was “serviceable.”⁴) Wilson’s well-received 1889 textbook, The State, for example, rehearsed all the familiar elements of state theory: the Aryan origins of the Anglo-American political tradition; a link between Teutonic history and the development of individual liberty; an explicit rejection of universalizing, natural law or social-compact theory; and a notion of the “organic political life” of a community as the source of sovereignty.⁵

Wilson’s fundamental issue with Burgess seems to have been that state theory left little room in American political life for creativity or any real novelty. As Wilson saw it, Burgess’s work cast political progress as “unconscious and unintelligent,” leaving “nothing for us to do.”⁶ To be relegated to such passivity was anathema to a fast-rising public figure such as Wilson, who saw great changes afoot and imagined an active role in directing them for great, visionary men (such as himself). Thus, in his hands, “the state” shed much of its prescriptive, normative thrust.

The full title of Wilson’s book on the topic gives an indication of the direction in which the concept of “the state” was to move in his work, and subsequently. First subtitled Elements of Historical and Practical Politics, the book bore a second, distinctly government-centric subtitle: A Sketch of Institutional History and Administration. Wilson was already a leading voice in the newly popular study of administration, and his treatment of the state gave prominent attention to the practical principles of governing, which he presented as significantly continuous across government systems. So throughout the book’s nearly 700 pages, government and its functions received more attention, and the Teutonic state appeared less as a singular, world-historic actor and more as one kind of state among many. Moreover, the organic will behind government also appeared in altered form, with the word “state” substituted by the broader “society.”⁷

In this, Wilson resembles James Bryce, whom he much admired (and eventually resembled, in that both enjoyed illustrious and internationally significant careers in practical politics). Bryce, too, had focused on the living institutions and quotidian practices of American politics, the nature of which he attributed to “opinion,” “character,” and material “circumstance.” The same year The State appeared, Wilson praised Bryce’s The American Commonwealth for demonstrating that American institutions were “the expression of the national life,” which was shaped both by “forces permanent in the history of the English race” and “peculiar influences … operative in our separate experience.”⁸ That is, as much as Wilson and Bryce privileged the real over the ideal—government itself over “the state”—each maintained the link between political institutions and a racial collectivity. Similarly, both men sought to show history as at once “a record of the progress toward civilization of races originally barbarous” in accordance with their innate capacities and meaningfully shaped by contingency and “circumstance.”⁹

The State was meant for students, a “general clarification” of “systems of government and the main facts of institutional history” arrived at “through the use of a thorough comparative and historical method.”¹⁰ Not surprisingly, then, it presented the conventional wisdom in political science, inflected with newer currents in political scholarship, in particular the imperative to look past legal forms to the practices of political life. Likewise Bryce, a generation older, had begun to give a realistic slant to a traditional approach by disdaining the niceties of state theory while preserving much of its thrust, including the linkage of national character, race, and political institutions, as well as the suggestion of a collective political subject residing outside, and breathing life into, formal institutions.

However, while both men retained the idea that a collective consciousness shaped and animated government, in their work this collectivity was beginning to take a less specific form and to lose much of its particularly political character. Where race had once been the essence that political forms expressed, in their work and subsequently these things increasingly appeared in dynamic relationship to one another. Moreover, these authors, like many who would follow them, sought to shift the discipline’s focus away from the source of sovereignty and the justification of democracy and toward the day-to-day workings of institutions in an actually existing democratic polity. Crucially, this would include the practical “reality” of racial difference.

Reform and Racial Difference

At the turn of the twentieth century, U.S. political science lacked a central institutional home outside Columbia’s Academy of Political Science, which was dominated by students, faculty, and alumni from that university. However, the idea of an independent, national, professional organization gained traction as the PhDs trained there, at Johns Hopkins, and at even younger graduate programs (notably the University of Wisconsin and the University of Chicago) spread to teach courses in political science in colleges and universities nationwide.¹¹ A series of planning sessions in 1902 culminated the following year at a meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) with the announcement of a new American Political Science Association.¹² The political science group selected Columbia’s Frank Goodnow as its first president and held its first independently organized meeting in Chicago in 1904.

The original plan had been for a society of “comparative legislation,” but the APSA’s founders aspired to understand the “actual practices” of politics beyond what Wilson, borrowing a term from Walter Bagehot, had disparagingly called its “literary” (i.e., legal) forms.¹³ Accordingly, it was decided that the association would encompass the “entire field of political science.”¹⁴ After attending the first planning meeting in 1902, Burgess disappeared from any important role in the new association, which came to be spearheaded primarily by younger men representing a range of institutions, not exclusively academic.¹⁵

Exactly how Burgess was sidelined is murky. What is clear, however, is that the leadership of the new APSA wished to chart a new course. When Goodnow gave APSA’s first presidential address, he put his listeners on notice that from then forward the discipline would not “permit” the “political philosopher … to roam at will, subject to no check on the exuberancy of his fancy or caprice.” Rather, political scholarship would attend scrupulously to “the extra-legal customs and extra-legal organizations” that shape the “actual political system of a country.”¹⁶

This shift would leave the discipline less explicitly anchored to a theory of American democracy as Aryan Volksgeist and as a result would authorize a more experimental and pragmatic view of American institutions. Interpreting the development of the state and remaining true to its spirit had been Burgess’s central preoccupations. For many younger political scientists, “science” and “spirit” were antithetical terms. To qualify as the former, political scholarship had to offer a hardheaded appraisal of the facts, uncorrupted by preconceived philosophical frameworks, and point to real-world solutions to urgent problems of the day.

As we have seen, amid this increasing insistence on an inductive, empirical orientation to political life, “the state” did not disappear but began to shed some of its prescriptive force. Where once the term had been central to professional political analysis, signifying the soul of the race and the source of sovereignty, after the turn of the century the idea of a state standing behind and authorizing government increasingly came to signal the more prosaic notion that governing forms and practices reflected, and ought to be appropriate to, the character of a “people.”¹⁷ Less concerned with discerning the normative content of history, political scientists like Wilson and like-minded colleagues sought to describe and understand the functioning of American institutions and were open to the idea that those institutions might need fundamental alteration if they were to continue to serve American ideals.

Nonetheless, a racialized conception of “the people” persisted and helped to lend a conservative cast to political scientists’ reformism. For example, Wilson no less than Burgess held up Reconstruction as the prime example of a failure to grasp the basic facts of political life and of the ways in which the American system could fail to safeguard the people’s will. For many of Wilson’s contemporaries, too, Reconstruction served as a cautionary tale about both racial difference and the dangers of political action guided by principle rather than by a dispassionate, scientific estimation of political life as it was. To be scientific, political science would have to attend less to doctrine. Its task, rather, would be to discern how the practice of politics could accommodate not only new economic and social realities but also lasting “anthropological” truths.

Both this more pragmatic, experimental attitude and the sense that racial issues were of prime importance put political scientists firmly in the intellectual mainstream at the turn of the century. The Progressive Era in the United States and elsewhere was animated by an intense faith that scientific knowledge could solve social problems. And while progressivism had a left flank that engaged structural economic questions, among many American progressives, “social problems” often served as shorthand for the existence of people different from themselves and/or operating for whatever reason outside the bounds of familiar norms and hierarchies. Racial (and what were coming to be distinguished as “ethnic”) differences received special attention.¹⁸

Of course the term progressive is now applied to a broad range of tendencies, and many intellectuals and other elites at the turn of the century didn’t fit the label at all. However, as Rogers Smith puts it, the era nevertheless saw an “elite convergence” on certain ideals and a strong push for government to enact reforms guided by them. In Michael McGerr’s gloss, the progressive tendency centered on four “quintessential” ends: “to change other people; to end class conflict; to control big business; and to segregate society.” Similarly, Smith connects the various strains of progressivism through a common vision of a “modern democratically and scientifically guided nation that was also culturally ordered, unified, and civilized due to the predominance of northern European elements in its populace and customs.”¹⁹

It was in many ways a frightening period for the educated middle and upper classes. William McKinley’s victory over William Jennings Bryan in the 1896 presidential election ended the threat posed by Populism and the radical, farmer-worker alliance that had propelled it. But it did not resolve the issues underlying that insurgency and others like it: the rise of unprecedentedly massive corporations and consolidation of wealth at the top that seemed to threaten republican ideals; a breathtaking pace of urbanization and immigration that transformed the landscape and population; crippling, repeated economic depressions that fueled intense, often violent episodes of labor protest and repression.²⁰ The cities seemed to be exploding, and at times they actually did—revolutionary anarchists and others bombed and otherwise targeted political and business figures, factories, railroads, and other symbols of capitalist power at the turn of the century regularly enough to make such attacks “a central preoccupation of American politics and culture.”²¹ The acquisition by the United States of overseas colonies likewise presented challenges to traditional notions of the country’s place in the world.

Nonetheless, it was also a time of wild, even utopian hopes among many elites. Where economic, ideological, and demographic changes threatened anarchy, progressives of various political stripes had great faith that scientific insight and the power of the state could be wielded in concert to produce a harmonious, well-ordered society. In The Promise of American Life, perhaps the paradigmatic statement of centrist progressivism, Herbert Croly argued that American prosperity, free political institutions, and the “worthier set of men” these would create offered “the highest hope for an excellent worldly life that mankind has yet ventured.”²² Unlike Burgess and Adams, who looked to the past to guide the present, progressives were predisposed to see modernity itself—big, efficient institutions, including government, corporations, and labor unions; expanded trade; and, for some, overseas territory—as American democracy’s best hope for deliverance from the scourges of economic depression, socialism, and general unrest. Fueled by support from industrialists interested in promoting scientific and technical progress, an explosion of professional societies, universities, and specialized journals promised new platforms for a newly self-conscious intellectual class eager to put its expertise at the service of this project.

In this context, many of the first homegrown PhDs in political science in the United States thought that the time was ripe to expand the purview of political scholarship and to make themselves useful to a government that had recently taken on new functions, including the management of an overseas empire. The rapid transformation of the American economy and society since the mid-nineteenth century had, they affirmed, delivered a world qualitatively different from that of the previous generation. The old formulas simply no longer applied.

Burgess’s political science sought to legitimate and proscribe, depending on the idea of “the state” to authorize American democracy while simultaneously marking its limits. The dominant tendency among the political scientists who would assume disciplinary leadership after Burgess, however, would be to see the workings of democracy as more pressing than its warrants. Goodnow, along with Wilson and others, consistently emphasized that things like democratic legitimacy and what Goodnow called “that elusive thing called sovereignty” had been problems for a post–Civil War age.²³ “Efficiency” and “administration” were to be the watchwords of the new century, and the organization of the APSA was meant to put political science in step with the times.

To accomplish this, political scholarship would need to move away from the legalism and teleology of earlier years, and toward what appeared to be firmer scientific (that is, realistic, empirical, and inductive) footing. According to Shaw, twentieth-century political science would consist of “the orderly presentation of facts and the formulating of conclusions … of practical benefit to the perplexed legislator in time of his need.”²⁴ As a result, things like the search for the Teutonic origins of liberty came to seem much less urgent, even quaint. Political scientists, Wilson urged, needed to focus on how to “run a constitution,” something that “was getting harder … than to frame one.”²⁵

It is one thing to announce a new course for political knowledge and another to chart one, however. The frequency of calls for empiricism at APSA meetings over the years suggests that many continued to have misgivings about the discipline’s progress on that front. And not all observers were left with the impression that the APSA offered anything new or unusual. For example, when Political Science Quarterly reviewed the first issue of the Proceedings of the American Political Science Association, it affirmed that the “association’s field of activity” was to be the “study of the state,” with perhaps a novel emphasis on administrative law.²⁶

Certainly around this time it became less common for every commentary on a given political event or institution to sweep through the centuries in search of origins and explanations. The valorization of inductivism and fact-gathering, moreover, meant that the writing in political science journals was drained of much of its drama. Page after page of the profession’s journals would be stuffed with matter-of-fact reports of legislative and judicial action, political developments, and administrative organization in the United States, Europe, and colonial possessions, often with little in the way of analysis and even less of the lofty pronouncements that Burgess had favored and that Goodnow would mock as “empyrean … speculation.”²⁷

Nevertheless, these shifts masked significant continuities, particularly with regard to questions of racial difference and democratic unity. When Burgess was its leading light, political science had rested heavily on the tenets that races were organic and naturally separate units, that whites (and particularly “Teutons”) were superior, and that political interference with the natural racial order was doomed to fail. As we shall see, this did not change as his influence waned. Nor, even as political scientists sought to distance themselves from philosophical generalization, were grand pronouncements about the relative capacities and proper hierarchy of races subject to much in the way of empirical scrutiny. On the contrary, as they had in Burgess’s work, invocations of racial difference continued to serve almost as talismans anchoring propositions about political life to seemingly basic facts of nature.

Moreover, if there was a generational break in political science, it was one without an explicitly ideological edge. Despite the general recognition that both new modes of political analysis and governing would be required, most prominent political scientists of Wilson’s generation followed Burgess in viewing active government more as a danger than as the democratizing force some left progressives championed.²⁸ During the Gilded Age, political economy and sociology attracted many young, reform-minded scholars steeped in “dissenting evangelical piety and social millennialism” and seeking new solutions to the “social question.” Their political commitments often put them sharply at odds with more conservative colleagues, resulting in hard-fought contests for control of departments and professional associations.²⁹ However, whereas many aspiring economists and sociologists were animated by alarm at the harms to the masses wrought by capitalism, the group that led APSA tended to view the problem the other way around. In general, political scientists of this generation concerned themselves more with the damage that ill-conceived or excessive democracy might do to a modern, industrial state.³⁰

However, there was a general sentiment that a doctrinaire commitment to limited government would no longer suffice. It would be the task of a science of politics and administration to guide government’s pursuit of social goals while keeping that pursuit within reasonable limits. Wilson’s one-time Johns Hopkins classmate Albert Shaw captured this general feeling in his presidential address to the APSA just a few years after Goodnow’s, affirming that, “for better or for worse,” new forces—particularly calls for economic regulation—were transforming the country. He was unenthusiastic at this prospect—he preferred “no rules of the game” to “very bad ones” that might “discourage wealth production.” Still it was evident that “everywhere there is … a powerful determination to make use of … governmental power and agency.” If, as he believed, this could not be stopped, then the APSA’s task was to bring a “moderating” and “scientific spirit” to bear on when and how such power might be used.³¹

Stephen Skowronek casts Wilson’s presidency in this light. For Skowronek, Wilson’s liberal reforms as president were motivated less by a desire to transform society or its basic hierarchies than to preserve the essence of an old social and racial order in new circumstances.³² An examination of the racial entailments of Wilson’s political science lends support to this view. His scholarship was consistently animated by the sense that the old institutions of American politics had failed and only new arrangements could guarantee the kind of society those institutions had once sustained. However, this was not at all unique to Wilson. An orientation to reform as a method of conservation or recuperation of old values and hierarchies was a common theme in political science journals and meetings during this period.

Wilson’s influence probably played a part in promoting this orientation. Congressional Government, which was published in 1885, had been an argument for just such a program of reform. That work pointed to a radical disjuncture between the constitutional theory of balanced, separated powers and what Wilson saw as the post–Civil War reality of “congressional supremacy.” For Wilson, the central problem with American government was exemplified by the ability of a minority in Congress to enact radical policies, such as Reconstruction (that “extraordinary carnival of public crime” that resulted when freed slaves were thrust into “unnatural” ascendancy over whites).³³

For most constitutional analysts, the fragmentation of the American system was its defining democratic feature, in that it hindered a potentially tyrannical concentration of power at the top. Wilson saw attachment to this idea as backward-looking and sentimental, arguing that in a context where the real threat came from tyrannical minorities, a strong executive better guaranteed liberty. His model was the British system in which a ruling party controlling both parliament and the prime minister’s office provided clearer lines of accountability and democratic control.

Wilson’s argument was provocative. In advocating a fundamental reordering of the constitutional system, it displaced Burgess’s “ideal American commonwealth”³⁴ from the pinnacle of political development. It suggested that the flowering of Teutonic liberty might be off course in America or, worse, that no course might be charted at all. Wilson’s empiricism was certainly limited—it has been widely noted that he never actually visited Congress while conducting his research. Still, the book was exciting in that it sought to analyze “actual practices” of politics, and not just juridical forms. It received praiseful notice for the sharp contrast it drew between the ideal and the real, as well as for its sense that present politics were more dynamic than previously suggested.

Still, Congressional Government was far from a radical screed. As it happened, the terms of present politics were not good, and the changes Wilson advocated were meant to recuperate what could be salvaged of a lost past. Crucially, this included a racial order that had been disrupted by the Civil War and Reconstruction. In Wilson’s estimation, after Lincoln’s death, organized minorities who controlled the committee system in Congress—notably the Radical Republicans pushing Reconstruction policies—had run roughshod over the weak executive, resulting in such tyrannical measures as federal election inspectors enforcing black voting rights over the objections of southern whites and the officials whites had elected.³⁵ For Wilson, the fragmentation of government meant to keep it in check instead provided opportunities for an extremist minority to gain unwonted power and to foist an alien people onto the American electorate.

In the 1885 book, the (mostly implied) remedy was a more deliberative legislature, closely integrated with the executive branch. In his 1908 Constitutional Government, Wilson would place more emphasis on the executive, looking” to the President as the unifying force in our complex system, the leader both of his party and of the nation,” and as a prudent antidote to an unreflective, minority-driven Congress.³⁶ As Wilson saw it, the executive reflected the naturally conservative will of the (white) “people” as a whole. That is, the executive embodied or gave expression to something quite akin to Burgess’s “state,” still identified with the Anglo-Saxon element of the American population but now residing in the presidency rather than in the judiciary. Burgess had looked to the “aristocracy of the robe” to act as the state’s check on the capricious power of the legislature.³⁷ For Wilson, a stronger, more integrated presidential government would take on this role, protecting tradition and safeguarding (whites’) liberty against alien influences and the misguided crusades of ideological minorities. Wilson’s proposed radical restructuring and strengthening of American government was a way to direct and temper government action in the service of existing hierarchies—the forms and methods would be new, but they would be deployed for old purposes.

“Not Factitious but Anthropological”

Wilson sought constitutional reordering in order to safely accommodate new realities—including, especially, the reality of a free African American population. The question of how to accommodate American institutions to a new, post-Reconstruction racial settlement loomed equally large at APSA meetings and in political science journals. Some commentators, like Wilson, would recommend new political arrangements. Others would turn primarily to administration, suggesting that if racial others had (against all scientific principles) been given a formal, legal grant of equality, some flexibility in the application of those laws would be called for.

Across generational and theoretical divides, political scientists were united in a near-consensus that African Americans were inferior, politically incompetent, and unsuited to live under a legal system constituted by and for Anglo-Saxons.³⁸ There was also general agreement that by their very presence in the United States African Americans challenged social peace and the viability of constitutional principles, and that any attempt to integrate them into American democracy necessarily stemmed from a catastrophic misunderstanding of that basic truth.

In an early volume of PSQ, William Chauncy Langdon articulated a principle that would go largely unchallenged in political science for some time. As he saw it, “The negro [was] not an Anglo-Saxon, or a Celt, or Scandinavian—only undeveloped and with a black skin…. The African [was] on the contrary a wholly distinct race, and the obstacles to social equality and political co-efficiency” with “our own” race were “not factitious but anthropological.”³⁹ These judgments stood through the early years of the twentieth century (and beyond), and were voiced at APSA’s meetings and in its publications no less than they had been at Columbia and in PSQ. That is, as much as the first generation of U.S.-trained scholars may have sought to radically reorient their discipline, they were united with the founding generation in their sense that no account of politics could be scientific without an understanding of the significance of racial difference.

Even a cursory examination of Political Science Quarterly shows that the Burgess/Dunning/Wilson line on Reconstruction reigned unchallenged there for years. PSQ’s monotony in this regard certainly owes much to Dunning’s and Burgess’s influence at Columbia. However, the birth of the APSA and the launching of the American Political Science Review in 1906 led to no slackening of interest in these topics, nor did it lead to any real stirrings of dissent from the reigning estimation of Reconstruction, African Americans in general, or the prospect of racial equality on almost any front. What developed instead was a consensus that the emerging Jim Crow regime of racial segregation and stratification represented a moderate, pragmatic response to the realities of racial difference. The fact that it might occasionally do violence to constitutional strictures simply demonstrated that those strictures had been based on an inadequate and misinformed political theory that the new century could ill-afford.

In some representative examples drawn from the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, black people appeared in PSQ and, later, in papers presented at the APSA and articles in the APSR, as the “half-civilized,”⁴⁰ “alien” element within the American population. At best, blacks were depicted as the “permanent[ly] … indolent and thriftless,”⁴¹ “spoil of the politician,”⁴² “unfit” to vote,⁴³ lacking “initiative and inventive genius,” and prone to chicken-stealing⁴⁴; at worst, “savage”⁴⁵ and determined to “outrage and murder” Southern whites’ “young daughters.”⁴⁶

On occasion, commenters referred with relief to the idea that negro unfitness might be a self-limiting problem. For example, in a PSQ review, Columbia’s Gary N. Calkins found grounds for optimism in Frederick Hoffman’s “convincing” thesis that “the American negro” was so racially feeble as to be headed for extinction. To Calkins’s cautious relief, “the race of negroes[’] … downward grade,” meant it was less likely to “menace our republican institutions.”⁴⁷ Another author noted approvingly that “a very large proportion of the negroes born in this country die in childhood,” thus mitigating the “danger” that whites might be “overwhelmed.”⁴⁸ (Bryce made a similar observation in the North American Review in 1891, commenting sanguinely that, troubling as the negro problem might be, demographic data suggested that “time [was] on the side” of “the white race.”)⁴⁹

A review of these two main political science journals and the proceedings of APSA meetings up to and including 1910 yields no counters to these images of black inferiority, and just one sympathetic, extended treatment of Reconstruction and black voting rights.⁵⁰ That sympathetic treatment was a 1905 address to the American Political Science Association by Albert Bushnell Hart. Hart, a German-educated Harvard historian who (like Dunning) would go on to serve as president of both the American Historical Association and the APSA, occupies an ambivalent position in Reconstruction historiography. He invoked the abolitionists as his spiritual “ancestors” and at Harvard mentored W. E. B. Du Bois, whom he invited to read a paper favorable to Reconstruction at the 1909 AHA conference.⁵¹ However, Hart also edited the series in which Wilson and Dunning’s scurrilous histories of Reconstruction appeared, and in a 1910 book he displayed a more settled belief in black inferiority (at least in the medium term) as well as what an approving APSR reviewer characterized as healthy “acceptance of the inevitable” with regard to the racial order in the post-Reconstruction south.⁵²

Whatever his ambiguities, in 1905 Hart took an extreme minority position on Reconstruction, suggesting to listeners at the APSA that Reconstruction governments had been unfairly maligned. As Hart saw it, black suffrage during Reconstruction had been incomplete and brief and had ended via a “violent and irregular process,” leaving scholars with little real evidence as to “the capacity of the negro to exercise discretion in his vote.”⁵³ Again, however, this position put Hart well outside the mainstream. When he delivered his paper to the APSA, he was paired with Baltimore Attorney General John Rose, whose talk on “Suffrage Conditions in the South: The Constitutional Point of View” was harshly critical of calls to enforce black voting rights; all three discussants at the panel took a similar stance.⁵⁴ Rose’s address (without Hart’s) was published in the inaugural issue of the APSR under the more direct title, “Negro Suffrage: The Constitutional Point of View”; a sympathetic account of “Racial Distinctions in Southern Law” appeared alongside it.⁵⁵ Clearly, these were not marginal issues—with only two other full-length pieces in that issue, exactly half of the articles in the APSR’s first issue were justifications of disenfranchisement and segregation. Moreover, aside from Hart’s cautious defense of Reconstruction, the journals and meetings featured no dissent from the proposition that sentimental ideas about equality or moralistic attachment to constitutional guarantees had no place in the scientific treatment of those issues, which was to be governed instead by pragmatic considerations and scientific dispassion.

Rose’s APSR article offers a particularly clear formulation of the pragmatic realpolitik that characterized this discussion. He acknowledged that political distinctions based on race were clearly unconstitutional and that measures such as literacy tests and “grandfather” clauses were nothing more than subterfuge. They were, nonetheless, necessary. Echoing Wilson’s faith in the wise conservatism of national opinion, Rose urged deference to prevailing norms, even when they conflicted with what Wilson had called the “literary” form of the law. The important point, to Rose’s mind, was that law that got ahead of the population was doomed to fail. As he put it,

St. Paul has said that all things that are lawful are not expedient…. Let those who believe that whether his skin be white, yellow, red, brown, or black, a man’s a man for a’ that, be of good cheer. Either they are right or wrong. If the latter they will some day be thankful that their brothers in the South have not been able to see with their eyes…. Those who do not share the present feelings and convictions of the overwhelming majority of the white people of the South must walk warily. At the best, they can do only a little to hasten the coming of the day they long for. They can do much to postpone it.⁵⁶