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Chapter 1

“The White Man’s Mission”: John W. Burgess and the Columbia School of Political Science

Much of the credit for establishing the study of politics as a distinct learned discipline in the United States goes to John W. Burgess. A constitutional scholar, teacher of future presidents,¹ and prominent commentator on domestic and foreign affairs, Burgess “more than anyone else … established the disciplinary, professional, and intellectual foundations” of political science in the United States.² He articulated the paradigmatic theory of the emerging discipline, taught its first cohort of American-trained PhDs, helped to found its first U.S.-based scholarly journal and association, and fought successfully to establish specialized, nonprofessional graduate education of the kind that characterizes doctoral programs in the liberal arts and sciences today.³

Burgess was also an especially committed and vehement racist, even by the standards of late nineteenth-century America. With his colleague (and one-time student) William A. Dunning, Burgess “played a powerful and disreputable part” in cementing the image of Reconstruction as a “hideous tyranny” of “negro domination,” which was later popularized by Thomas Dixon’s Reconstruction novels and D. W. Griffith’s film, The Birth of a Nation.⁴ Burgess described the black-led Reconstruction legislatures of South Carolina and Louisiana as “the most soul-sickening spectacle that Americans had ever been called upon to behold,” and the legislators themselves as “ignorant barbarians.”⁵ He held firmly that “American Indians, Africans, and Asiatics” ought never to “form any active, directive part of the political population” in the United States and was skeptical about the wisdom of extending the suffrage to many non-Aryan whites.⁶ He thought Anglo-Saxons had a “world-duty of carrying civilization into the dark places of the earth,” justified the removal of native populations everywhere with the remark that “there is no human right to … barbarism,”⁷ and characterized even the most cautious statements of possible racial equality as “great sophism.” Even slavery, to which he described himself as “strongly hostile,” he saw as having been justifiable in its time “as a relation which could temporarily produce a better state of morals in a particularly constituted society than any other relation.”⁸ The “white man’s mission,” he wrote, “his duty and his right,” was “to hold the reins of political power in his own hands for the civilization of the world and the welfare of mankind.”⁹

Burgess’s attitudes are no secret. While he has been lauded as the “father” of American political science, commentators in recent decades are highly likely to note the racism that suffused his work. Particular attention has been paid to his leading role in constructing the harshly negative portrayal of Reconstruction that until recently dominated historiography on that period, and his racial views are invoked in debates over the significance of racism to American imperialism and in discussions of elite responses to the prospect of World War I.¹⁰ (Burgess was horrified at the idea of conflict between Anglo-Saxons and their Teutonic cousins, and he retrospectively described the U.S. declaration of war on Germany as “a grievous blow … my life’s work brought down in irretrievable ruin all about me.”)¹¹ Until very recently, however, his ideas about race, Reconstruction, and imperialism have not been more than passingly explored in the historiography of political science or the discipline’s core concepts. That is, most considerations of Burgess’s role in formalizing the study of politics in the United States have treated his ideas about race and racial hierarchy as an unfortunate artifact of his times—a stain on his legacy and a problem for the contemporary relevance of his work, certainly, but little more.

However, this limits our understanding of Burgess and, more important, of how systematic political inquiry came to occupy a distinct academic field in the United States. The problem is not that recent commentators have been insufficiently indignant or embarrassed about Burgess’s racial ideology.¹² It is, rather, that by failing to take it seriously as a fundamental aspect of his thought, we miss how his racial ideas shaped his political science and the vision for the discipline that he did so much to realize.

Burgess saw political progress as the expression of a racially specific national soul (which he called “the state”). From this perspective, national homogeneity and Anglo-Saxon (“Teutonic”) domination were necessary to American (and, by extension, civilization’s) advance. More generally, Burgess saw historical development, political sovereignty, and the possibility of democracy itself as determined in basic ways by racial inequality and difference. Burgess, his students, and his colleagues also invoked the seemingly scientific status of “race” to bolster the most basic claim to intellectual authority they made in this period. This was the idea that they were freeing political and historical theory from abstractions that they believed had previously dominated it and rooting it instead in objective science, practiced according to rigorous methods by credentialed professionals.

Scientific Politics and the Gilded Age “Crisis”

Before the Civil War, higher education existed in the United States primarily to train clergy and to hone the character and morals of young gentlemen of the upper classes. Advanced science and technical education became available with the founding of the Rensselaer School in 1824,¹³ and these fields saw rapid expansion in midcentury. But it was not until the decades after the Civil War and Reconstruction that anything like the modern, specialized, secular university appeared in the United States.¹⁴ Serious works of social and political analysis had certainly been produced before that period, and some were even by college professors. Particularly influential was the German immigrant scholar Francis Lieber, whose marriage of German historicism to a liberal, nationalist account of American history was carried forward in Burgess’s work.¹⁵ However, the social sciences as such—distinct, professional enterprises with identifiable institutional affiliations, specific barriers to entry, and aspirations to scientific status—only began to take shape in the United States in the late nineteenth century, with political science among the first to establish a home in the new university system.

For Thomas L. Haskell and Dorothy Ross, among others, the social sciences, the new universities, and the intellectual style associated with each of these were in significant ways products of “crisis,” brought about by the disruption and social ferment of the Civil War and its aftermath.¹⁶ For Haskell, the ideal of the academic as belonging to a specialized “community of the competent” was a response by the northeastern upper classes to a society that seemed increasingly disinclined to defer to its authority. For Ross, this period saw the dissolution of an elite consensus about the bases of knowledge and the course of American history, as science challenged theological authority and rapid change threatened comforting notions of America as an “exceptional” nation. On an institutional level, Stephen Skowronek sees the new universities as part of the “rise of the new American state” in this period, meant to create and rationalize a modern administrative apparatus in response to the realities of an industrialized, urban, and interconnected economy.¹⁷

The story of the institutionalization of political scholarship in the United States conforms to these largely complementary accounts. Although not born to the northeastern gentry, Burgess spent his professional life in institutions dominated by men of that group and even at times identified as a northerner.¹⁸ Certainly his anxiety about popular economic and political demands was palpable—so much so that Daniel Rodgers numbers Burgess among a cohort of new political and legal professionals in this period seeking to “wrest the language of political legitimacy away from the people” and put a “new set of constitutional limits” around their powers.¹⁹

In fact, Burgess’s politics were complicated, combining a commitment to nationalism with deep suspicion of active, centralized government. He thought that a homogeneous population and a strong judiciary were the keys to producing a robust and ordered polity without the incursions on liberty that would result from powerful democratic government. He was also deeply concerned that America might veer off its “true path … toward despotism on the one side or anarchy on the other.”²⁰ To avert these catastrophic alternatives, political knowledge and governing practices had to be grounded in sound, scientific principles rather than a priori, philosophical speculation about natural rights or social contracts. Burgess’s scholarship and the School of Political Science he founded were explicitly dedicated to those purposes, and the impulses to rationalize politics and assert upper-class authority animated them both.

A case in point is civil service reform, the public cause with which Burgess and the School of Political Science were most visibly associated in the 1880s. Burgess originally envisioned the school as a training ground for public administrators and officials along the lines of the (then-private) École Libre des Sciences Politiques in Paris.²¹ Its graduates were to supply enlightened public servants to replace the machine bosses and patronage appointments controlling many of America’s government institutions at the time. When the school was launched in 1880, the Columbia newspaper published a cartoon captioned “True Civil Service Reform.” It depicted Burgess leading his colleagues in full medieval battle gear, commanding a cannon labeled “Political Science” and trained on ramparts emblazoned with the words “To The Victor The Spoils.”²²

The imagery was apt. Like many reformers, proponents of civil service reform were class warriors of a sort, seeking to displace corrupt mass politics with administration by what Burgess’s one-time student Richard T. Ely called “a natural aristocracy” drawn from respectable society and educated in enlightened governance. This group alone, Burgess agreed, possessed the “intelligence, skill and fidelity” to competently identify and carry out the common weal.²³

Moreover, again as with much of the Gilded Age and Progressive reform tradition, this class politics was bound up with racial ideology.²⁴ White elites had mostly looked with horror at the black-led administrations of the Reconstruction South and many saw depoliticizing government functions as a hedge against the consequences of black suffrage.²⁵ Similarly, despite the fact that political machines long predated the “new” immigration of the late nineteenth century, these things were conflated in the minds of many reformers. As a result, the arguments for civil service reform were often made in explicitly racialized and anti-immigrant terms. James Bryce, an eminent British politician and student of American politics,²⁶ argued that political machines existed because of the “ignorant and pliable voters” supplied by the recent wave of immigration, which brought “primitive people, such as the South Italian peasants,” suited only to “quasi-feudal relationships.”²⁷ A civil service chosen on merit and by exam would eliminate the patronage that greased the machine’s gears, reducing corruption and, with it, any incentive for these groups to interest themselves in political life. Burgess, likewise, saw any participation in government of non-Teutonic people as a recipe for “corruption and confusion,” since only “the Teuton” possessed a “superior political genius.” That is, not even all white men could be counted among the custodians of “the welfare of mankind.” Rather, that role was to fall to the best men of “Teutonic” or “Aryan” stock, elite members of what he called “the political nations par excellence.”²⁸

Burgess’s vision of a school for enlightened public service proved premature. While Burgess was optimistic that the school might “place its students in immediate connection with the Civil Service examinations, so far as they now exist” and also “exert its influence … for the extension of same,” the committee charged with evaluating his proposal was skeptical. They endorsed his plan in substance, but noted that it was unlikely that “the possession of superior qualifications will necessarily afford the aspirant … any very substantial … advantage.” Still, they agreed with Burgess that “a class of men better prepared in the principles” of political economy, politics, law, and history than were “most of those who control the destinies of our people at this time” was “greatly wanted.”²⁹

As it turns out, the committee had the right side of the argument, at least in the short term. The Pendleton Act, which had aimed to depoliticize the civil service, covered only 10 percent of government jobs when it was passed in 1883, and that percentage was to rise only gradually for several years. As a result, the immediate demand for graduates of the Columbia School of Political Science was to come less from government institutions than from colleges and universities, as institutions of higher education expanded their enrollments and the doctoral degree came to be sine qua non for professors. Nonetheless, this case lends support to the argument that the university project was bound up with concerns about the transformation of old hierarchies. Similarly, it bears out Skowronek’s linkage of universities to the rise of modern administrative practices—if not as a response to state demand for personnel and expertise, then as a site for ideological and political organization, as well as what today’s schools of management and administration would call “capacity building.” It also hints at the ways in which the university model was shaped by racial ideas and anxieties circulating in its infancy.

While Burgess’s school may have done little to reform American government institutions in the short term, it did much to transform the study of politics, creating a new set of homegrown credentials and a shared, scientific language. Confronted with the economic upheaval, demographic shifts, labor conflict, and radical movements of the Gilded Age, the political professionals at Columbia sought to keep the “reins of government” in the right hands. “Humanitarian outbursts,” the narrow interest claims of everyday democratic practice, and majoritarian rule alike were inadequate to the challenges of the moment. Burgess and his colleagues sought to meet them with stronger stuff. A central component of this was to be a sound account of human difference.

The “Most Serious and Delicate Task”

The rapid pace of immigration lent urgency to this effort. Like many American intellectuals in this period, however, Burgess and his students were primarily concerned with coming to terms with the country’s—and their—recent past. It was a past that seemed to call for a radical rethinking of American political life. The democratic experiment had not been meant to erupt in a bloody conflagration. Nor did the rapidly expanding and often ruinously volatile economy of the post–Civil War era fit the picture of the sturdy producers’ republic that previous theory had painted. The faith of the founders seemed “absurdly obsolete” and replacing it would require understanding the causes and consequences of the war.³⁰

Burgess’s political science was committed to this project. For him, the “most serious and delicate task in literature and morals” was to write the history of the United States from 1816 through the outbreak of the Civil War. A new and correct understanding of this period was to his mind the key to developing a “national opinion upon the fundamental principles of our polity” and to beginning to settle political questions on the “merits” rather than through the lenses of sectional prejudice.³¹ Burgess also had a personal stake in coming to terms with the conflict and in reconciling Northern and Southern perspectives. Born in 1844 to a slave-holding, Unionist family in Tennessee, and spending his adult life among the Northeastern elite, he more than once characterized his life’s work as a response to his firsthand experiences of the Civil War and the (to his mind) catastrophic experiment in racial equality that followed it.

Burgess retrospectively described his Civil War experiences in terms of persecution, exile, and finally revelation. According to his 1934 memoir, he was driven from his home as a teenager by thuggish, secessionist “freelances” who “took this occasion to wreak their vengeance upon their unionist neighbors for every personal grudge which existed between them, as well as for political differences.” Threatened with conscription into Confederate forces, he was forced to flee on a half-hour’s notice, under cover of darkness and alone save for “a beautiful mare” that his father had “ordered … a negro” to prepare for him. After a grueling journey (the horse didn’t make it), he reached Federal lines and volunteered as a scout for the Union Army, painfully aware that he would be executed as a traitor if Confederate forces captured him.³²

It was during this “frightful experience” that he divined “the first suggestion” of his future calling. His memoir recounts a night of sentinel duty, overlooking the aftermath of a battle and straining his “eyes to peer into the darkness” and his “ears to perceive the first sounds of an approaching enemy”: “I found myself murmuring to myself: ‘Is it not possible for man, a being of reason, created in the image of God, to solve the problems of his existence by the power of reason and without recourse to the destructive means of physical violence?’ And I then registered the vow in heaven that if a kind of Providence would deliver me alive from the perils of the existing war, I would devote my life to teaching men how to live by reason and compromise instead of by bloodshed and destruction.”³³

Deliverance came not long after, in the form of a discharge followed by a northward journey to take up undergraduate studies at Amherst College. At Amherst, Burgess met the Hegelian philosopher Julius Seelye, whom Burgess described as “the man for whom I had been all my previous life looking.” Seelye taught him that universal reason was the “substance of all things” and that “it was the duty of man and the purpose of his existence to bring the precepts of reason to consciousness and … embody them in … thought and conduct, law and policy.”³⁴

Only a handful of doctoral programs existed in the United States at the time, and they were restricted to the natural sciences. For an advanced degree in any other field, ambitious Americans were forced to go to Europe. American students were attracted to German universities over French and English ones for intellectual reasons—including the exciting atmosphere of the “romantic rebellion against the Enlightenment,” the comparatively freewheeling nature of German intellectual debate, and the prominent role that scholars enjoyed in German public life at that time—but also for the financial inducements they offered and their relative profligacy with degrees. French universities required nine years of study with annual examinations. In Germany, however, matriculation was “a formality” and a student could return to the United States with a doctorate after studying for just two years and producing a brief thesis.³⁵ In 1871, Burgess set off on the latter path, deepening his immersion in German idealism and social thought with courses in philosophy, political science, public law, and ethnology at the Universities of Göttingen, Leipzig, and Berlin.

During the course of his studies, Burgess observed firsthand both the return of the victorious imperial troops to Germany after the Franco-Prussian War and the ouster of President Adolphe Thiers that brought the conservative Patrice de Mac-Mahon into power in France. Burgess considered these political experiences to have been as educational as his studies. He thrilled to see “the power of the new Germany make its triumphal entrance into the new imperial capital” and felt privileged to have “practically [seen] the German Empire constructed, both militarily and civilly.”³⁶ Moreover, despite some initial republican concern that France might be on course for a return to the monarchy, he soon saw that Mac-Mahon’s ascension “signified, happily for France … that the radical tendencies of the Revolution had been checked and that the Republic had been saved from threatened anarchy.”³⁷

Burgess’s European sojourn lasted two years, after which he returned to the United States determined that the life’s mission he had glimpsed during “that awful winter’s night” in 1863 would be furthered by implementing German-style advanced academic training at home.³⁸ A first attempt at Amherst College was rebuffed by the administration. Columbia offered better, if still not glowing, prospects. He found the place “a small old-fashioned college” and the student body mainly “rich loafers.”³⁹ If the college itself was slight and old-fashioned, its law school, where Burgess also had an appointment, was “technical” with a “stiff, required course of study” useful only for “imparting a knowledge of existing law.”⁴⁰ Columbia’s trustees, however, held the “promise of the future,” and allies on the board warmed to his vision of a school “for developing and improving the law as a science.”⁴¹ With their help, and after four years of strenuous politicking, the school was finally established in 1880.

Ultimately assuming a deanship, Burgess oversaw the institution of many now-typical aspects of modern PhD programs, including distinct academic departments and the predominance of the seminar.⁴² More important for present purposes, he created the conditions for an academic discipline of politics in the United States, supplying it with an institutional home and exemplary form, a “core” intellectual framework and standard of rigor, and a cohort of American-trained scholars qualified to teach it at the college and graduate levels.⁴³

In many ways, then, the study of politics as it took shape in the university setting in the United States was an explicit attempt to meet the challenges of the Gilded Age with better ideas and a wider perspective than those that had seemingly failed antebellum America so spectacularly. Burgess, his colleagues, and his students were particularly focused on understanding the causes of the Civil War and the lessons of its aftermath. At a deeper level, avoiding the mistakes of previous generations appeared to require new answers to the urgent questions the conflict had raised: What binds a nation? Where does sovereignty lie? What does it mean to be self-governing? What are the limits of self-government?

Several things seemed clear: No fictitious social contract was capable of creating a solidary national community, and rights claims could be profoundly dangerous when asserted by parts against the whole of society. Moreover, grand statements of human equality and rights in the Declaration of Independence and abolitionist doctrine, however noble in the abstract, were not objective descriptions of reality but rather exemplified the sort of a priori reasoning and “mystical enthusiasm” that the late nineteenth century could ill afford.⁴⁴ These articles of an earlier political faith needed to be tempered by a sober appreciation, based in historical experience and scientific advance, of the source and limits of rights, and of how human difference shaped historical development and political life.

It was an article of scientific consensus at the time that one way human difference mattered was in determining who could thrive in which parts of the world. Indeed, what Robert Vitalis has called the “first law of international relations theory” was the conviction, popularized in the antebellum period by Robert Knox’s The Races of Men, that whites could thrive only in temperate zones, and blacks only in the tropics.⁴⁵ Gilded Age students of American history and politics placed this law, in Bryce’s phrase, “at the bottom” of the Civil War. Bryce, for example, saw the importation of slaves as a natural response to the fact that Southern winters were “cool enough to be reinvigorative, and to enable a race drawn from Northern Europe to thrive and multiply,” but the summers were “too hot for such a race.” Unfortunately, the “industrial and social conditions that were due to climate” had set up an irresoluble conflict with the North.⁴⁶

Burgess held that American slavery had come to the North as one of many “social customs,” based originally on the “firmly and universally established opinion of the time.” However, like Bryce, he subscribed to the theory that the “chief causes” of its eventual concentration in the South and the sectional conflict that followed lay in the interplay of geography and biology. Slave labor was unproductive in the North, where it was “too cold for [negroes] to thrive” and where difficult farming conditions “required a great deal … of intelligence, thrift, and industry in the laborer.” The southern colonies, on the contrary, had “vast, level areas of good soil,” “warm, uniform climate,” and “simple crops.” These provided “conditions favorable to the employment of negro labor” and ultimately to the development of a society and an economy fatally incompatible with the northern system.⁴⁷

Slavery had not been an unqualified error, however. Because Africans were “proof against” the malaria and hot climate that debilitated whites in the tropics, slave labor had in fact been necessary for the United States to realize its “manifest destiny.” As Burgess wrote in the second of a three-volume American history,

It is not easy to see how the rich-swamp lands of [the southern and southeastern] colonies could ever have been reclaimed and made tributary to the civilization of the world in any way but by the employment of negro labor. And it is not easier to see how the negro could then have been brought to do this great work save through slavery to the white race … under the direction of the superior intelligence of the white race, to the realization of objects determined by that superior intelligence…. And the pure negro would not at that period of his development labor voluntarily.

As Burgess saw it, slavery had served a useful dialectical function on the level of consciousness, as well. The “excessive nationalism” of the slave system called forth abolition, which, however misguided in his view, contained progressive elements that helped to shake the country out of its philosophical impasse.⁴⁸

For Burgess, then, the problem was not simply the fact of slavery, or even that race and geography had combined to unleash dynamics that culminated in inevitable conflict. It was that natural rights theory had been inadequate to illuminate and direct those dynamics, with disastrous consequences. The correct course would have been for North and South to come together around a common understanding that, by the mid-nineteenth century, “the time had come for a modification of the existing form of negro slavery in the South.”⁴⁹ However, because abolitionists clung to their abstract ideals, and Southern slaveholders to their material self-interest, progress had come too drastically and at far too high a price.

For Burgess, Reconstruction further showed that the Civil War had not broken the hold of misguided ideals or base materialism among those who controlled the nation’s destiny. Just as the fiction of a social contract had provided a rationale for secession, the fanatical passion of abolitionists for an (in Burgess’s mind) illusory ideal of equality had led the Republican Party to its “great mistake” of granting suffrage to the emancipated slaves. This meant subjecting whites to the “political control” of “ignorant barbarians” and to the profiteering of northern “carpet-bags.”⁵⁰ Indeed, if Burgess’s life’s work began to come clear to him on the Civil War battlefield, it crystallized again in an encounter with Reconstruction-era Tennessee. That “mournful experience” appears in his memoir as follows: “My own parents as well as all my former friends were living in more or less of distress and poverty, and the entire political and social structure was demoralized. It was in the midst of the so-called carpet-bag era, when the respectable and intelligent white people were disenfranchised and ignored, and the negroes, led by Northern adventurers, ruled and plundered the land. Neither property nor life nor chastity was safe, and men and women of the better sort longed to be laid at rest.”

In Burgess’s retelling, this spectacle prompted him to resolve “again that if the Providence which conducts the affairs of men would only sustain and direct me, I would give my life to the work of substituting reason for passion in determining the course of States and nations.” A “thoroughly impartial” accounting of the Civil War and Reconstruction would be part of this work, helping to elicit from the north a “sincere and genuine acknowledgement” that Reconstruction had been blundered. This was necessary to secure “real national brotherhood” between southern and northern whites. Burgess saw the Hayes-Tilden compromise, which effectively ended Reconstruction, as the first step toward just such an admission, however tacit. As he put it, the North was “learning every day by valuable experience that there are vast differences in political capacity between the races.”⁵¹

Furthering the work of this anything but “impartial” accounting were Burgess’s junior colleague, the political theorist and historian William Archibald Dunning, and a group of younger, mostly Southern historians whom the two men trained at Columbia.⁵² One of Burgess’s prize pupils, Dunning did his doctorate at Columbia and remained there for the rest of his career, rapidly rising to the Lieber professorship of history and political philosophy. Thirteen years younger than Burgess, and a northerner by birth (from Plainfield, New Jersey), educated at Dartmouth College and in New York and Berlin, Dunning shared neither Burgess’s firsthand experience of the Civil War battlefield nor his personal stake in Reconstruction. All the same, perhaps even more than his older colleague, Dunning was responsible for elevating the study of that period to a central place in American historiography and political analysis and for constructing an image of it that commanded widespread scholarly acceptance for most of the twentieth century. Burgess and Dunning’s students produced a raft of state-level studies that, with varying degrees of vitriol, denounced the corruption of “carpetbaggers,” “scalawags,” and black legislators and glorified the efforts of white “redeemers” to resist “Africanizing” the southern states.⁵³ For their part, Burgess and Dunning contributed sweeping, synthetic interpretations of Reconstruction as the tragic misadventure of a Radical Republican Congress in thrall to delusions of natural equality.⁵⁴ As both made clear, these were not conclusions of purely historical interest. Each was adamant that the lessons of 1816 through Reconstruction needed to be applied to pressing, current questions of immigration, the emerging regulatory state, and world affairs. And Burgess put his understanding of Reconstruction at the heart of the account of history, political change, and the sources of sovereignty and democratic legitimacy on which he built his political science.

The Teutonic “State” and the Science of History

Bryce observed, not without apprehension, that “one of the greatest achievements of science” up to his lifetime had been “making the world small.”⁵⁵ This meant, above all, a new world of migration and contact between races. Burgess, too, viewed this development with alarm. He saw that his generation had paid the price for the failure of unenlightened nationalism and eighteenth-century philosophy alike to appreciate properly the sources of national cohesion, the significance of racial difference, and the place of each in the progress of history. The new professional political science he sought to lead would, he hoped, avoid the same mistake for the twentieth century.

For Bryce, scientific advances may have been contributing to the problem, but scientific inquiry also promised to reveal solutions, or at least proper responses.⁵⁶ And for scholars of politics in the United States at the time, “science” signified above all the science of history. Both Burgess and Bryce were steeped in “Teutonism” or “Anglo-Saxonism.” This school of historical interpretation, much in vogue in England and America in the mid-nineteenth century, emphasized the continuity of history, holding that English and American institutions reflected an unbroken line of evolutionary development from antecedents in the ancient Germanic forests. Bryce was schooled in this tradition by the English historian E. A. Freeman, and his work reflects the Teutonist emphasis on both Anglo-Saxon supremacy and the centrality of race to political life more broadly.⁵⁷ However, Bryce himself was more interested in the newness and innovations to be found in America, and his celebrated American Commonwealth moved away from Teutonism’s emphasis on continuous development in favor of dense description of the country as he found it.

Burgess, however, put Teutonism front and center as he elaborated what was to become the dominant theoretical framework for university-based political science in the United States in the Gilded Age. This was the idea, laid out most thoroughly in Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law, that sovereignty and legitimacy were to be found in an organic, racialized unity termed “the state” that stood in “back of” and “distributed” its power to institutions of governance.⁵⁸ Midcentury northern publicists, notably Lieber, had used similar language to recruit Anglo-Saxonism to the cause of the Union, basing the Constitution’s authority in an “ethnoracial nation” deeper than and previous to any contract between states.⁵⁹ This idea was to hold great appeal for scholars in the 1880s and 1890s. Indeed, for Burgess, “the state” was the key to a scientific study of politics, and racial homogeneity was the key to the state’s development.

The state was at once spiritual and material, universal and embodied—Hegelian idealism infused with late nineteenth-century racial anthropology and social evolutionism.⁶⁰ It represented “the gradual and continuous development of human society … [and] of the universal principles of human nature” but was at the same time rooted in the “ethnologic concept” of the “nation” and “relations of birth and race-kinship.” Only the Teutonic (or Aryan) nations inherited the capacity to realize the highest form of the state. Latin and Greek civilizations had more limited political genius; Asia and Africa were home to only “unpolitical nations.”⁶¹

There was little that was original or idiosyncratic in the basic outlines of Teutonist state theory. Anglo-Saxonist history was well established, and the Gilded Age “saw Anglo-Saxon chauvinism pervade the upper reaches of American scholarly and political life.”⁶² Burgess’s achievement, which he shared to an extent with the Johns Hopkins University historian Herbert Baxter Adams, was to modernize this tradition, pursuing it with the zeal for rigorous, empirical methodology that was the hallmark of German historiography and embedding it in a newly professionalizing discipline.⁶³

The German approach involved above all commitment to a Rankean reconstruction of the past “as it really was” through painstaking work with primary sources as well as archaeological, geographic, philological, and other scientific investigation.⁶⁴ And, indeed, both Burgess and Adams grounded their work in voluminous, careful, legal and historical research. They were also affected by the excitement that a progressionist version of Darwinism, along with Herbert Spencer’s application of it to the social world, generated among late nineteenth-century scholars, who were evolutionists “almost to a man.”⁶⁵ As a result, Adams and Burgess produced versions of Teutonism that differed from their predecessors’ in being more pronouncedly laced with metaphors and assertions from ethnology and biology.⁶⁶ And of course the fact that they operated within universities where they were able to establish graduate programs meant that their Teutonism became the basis for training a generation of younger American scholars.

In Adams’s case, scientific history translated into minute excavations of the evolution of this or that New England tradition (town forms, traditional offices, etc.) from early Germanic prototypes, an enterprise that came to be known as “Teutonic germ theory.”⁶⁷ Proud to have established his history seminar in a converted biology lab, Adams likened his library of legal and historical documents to a natural history museum and argued that his methods extended the insights of evolutionary biology into the field of history. The “science of Biology,” he wrote, “no longer favors the theory of spontaneous generation. Wherever organic life occurs there must have been some seed for that life,” and a Teutonic “germ” taking root in American soil was the seed of its democratic institutions.⁶⁸ Scholars could illuminate the natural history of this process by “dissect[ing] government documents” and generally using “the laboratory method of work.”⁶⁹

While both scholars operated within a Hegelian framework and both located sovereignty in an organic community with Teutonic roots, Burgess’s program was perhaps more ambitious than Adams’s. Burgess sought to understand and vouchsafe the future of liberty. To do so, he thought, required specifying its past and tracing its development. In Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law, he compared the fundamental political institutions of the United States, Germany, Great Britain, and France, measuring each in terms of its contribution to the great problem of “reconciling government with liberty;” that is, of combining strong national sovereignty with the greatest measure of individual autonomy. This synthesis would be the chief characteristic of “the national State … the self-conscious democracy, the ultima Thule of political history.”⁷⁰

The Teutonic state was nothing less than the developing self-consciousness toward which all political history was groping, and it was in this national consciousness that the truth of sovereignty could be found. It, and not any aggregate of individuals, was the “self” in “self-government”; true liberty arose not from “mere ideas” about “the things … called natural rights” but only “through the action of the national State inscribing these ideas of individual immunity against governmental power” in fundamental law.⁷¹

The United States and its institutions represented the apogee of the state thus far achieved, and continuing its development was the “prime” and special “mission of the ideal American commonwealth.”⁷² However, as recent history had so vividly demonstrated, success was not assured. A “correct and profound appreciation of the historical development of the state” was the “only protection” against the ever-present “danger of diverging from the true path” to its successful realization.⁷³ In other words, since Burgess’s political science was devoted to explicating the historical development of the state, the discipline was charged with nothing less than stewarding the future of democracy and the possibility of liberty.

Fortunately, in the United States political scientists had good material to work with. The revolutionary basis of the American republic meant that with traditional encumbrances swept away, Americans had “seen the state organized” in its purest form in the Constitution, with its system of balanced, separated powers at once ensuring democracy and guarding against its excesses.⁷⁴ This self-organization of the state—not any compact of preexisting subjects or commonwealths—produced the Constitution. The Constitution, in turn, provided the basis for the legal doctrines and institutions that emerged as the state evolved toward its most perfect realization.

We have seen that this account provided a strong argument for the Union: If the states (plural) were created by a preexisting, sovereign unity (“the state,” singular), secessionist demands based on claims of a prior independent existence were nonsensical. Burgess’s account also constructed democratic legitimacy on the basis of a distinctly limited democracy. If the development of the state was to be seen in laws and legal institutions, judges and legal scholars—those Burgess admiringly called “the aristocracy of the robe”—would be better suited to maintain it on its course than any mechanisms of popular democracy.⁷⁵ That is, democratic legitimacy was grounded in the organic law produced by the nation’s historical development rather than in natural rights, social contracts, electoral processes, or any manifestation of popular politics whatsoever.⁷⁶ From this perspective, the state itself, and not the people (in any mundane sense), was the subject of popular sovereignty.

The preeminence of state and “Teutonic germ” theory, however thorough in its moment, was relatively short-lived. As late as 1903, a young Charles E. Merriam, then a recent graduate of Burgess’s department, was still referring to Burgess’s version of state theory as “the new system” and the culmination of “a change from the rather haphazard style of discussing political theory in earlier days to a more scientific way of approaching the questions of politics.”⁷⁷ Already by that point, however, Burgess no longer occupied a place at the center of the discipline—he was conspicuously absent from the leadership of the newly organizing American Political Science Association (see Chapters 2 and 3)—and many of Adams’s students were growing weary of laboriously researching foregone conclusions.⁷⁸ Worse, two decades later, a report on the Second National Conference on the Science of Politics (in which the very same Merriam, by then having assumed a Burgess-esque place in the discipline, played a leading role), categorized Burgess’s work and Teutonism more generally as “Pre-Scientific Studies” based on “speculation.”⁷⁹

How that happened, and what happened to Burgess-style race thinking in the process, is the subject of the rest of this book. For now, it is enough to imagine how maddening Burgess must have found this characterization, given that state theory was meant precisely as the antithesis of speculation. Burgess explicitly understood himself as engaged in a scientific revolt against what Elisha Mulford (something of a transitional figure between Lieber’s group of nationalist writers and Burgess’s contemporaries) called the “formulas and abstractions” that had seemingly dominated American political discourse since the Revolutionary generation. The condition of political science,” Mulford wrote, was the “apprehension of the nation as an organism”: “It involves the distinction of an art and a science; there may be, for instance, an art in building heaps of stones, but there is no science of stoneheaps. The unity and identity of structure in an organism, in which a law of action may be inferred, form the condition of positive science.”⁸⁰

For Burgess, race (that is, “relations of birth and race-kinship”) was the basis of the “unity and identity of structure” in the “organism” that was the state. Social contracts and natural rights belonged to the realm of philosophy. “History and ethnology” offered “elevated ground,” a “standpoint” from which to make valid political judgments.⁸¹ For example, as we have seen, Burgess located both the source and limit of popular sovereignty in the state. The basis for this apparent anomaly Burgess found on precisely that “elevated ground.”

From this vantage point, it appeared clear to Burgess that it would not be safe for “the popular or democratic form” to “exert its greatest influence” until America had “perfected its nationality.” That is, a truly “national” state would “permit … the participation of the governed in the government” because in a Teutonic state the population would support only “the enactment and administration of laws … whose effect will be the realization of the truest liberty.”⁸² However, in the late nineteenth century, “the ethnic character” of the American population was “very cosmopolitan …, conglomerated, so to speak, with other elements, numerically quite strong,” such as “Celts,” “Mongols,” and “negroes.” To make matters worse, the United States was fairly “prodigal” with suffrage.⁸³ Therefore, it remained necessary to limit legislative power and other instruments of popular control in favor of a strong federal judiciary.

Burgess worried that even in the heyday of his theory, its implications were never sufficiently appreciated by many readers. He lamented in his memoir that his work was misunderstood as “the ‘Leviathan’ of modern political science,” and that his critics never recognized that the state as it developed would limit government, not glorify it.⁸⁴ Indeed, Burgess exhibited a clear antipathy to the emerging regulatory apparatus of government, which he saw as an unwarranted intrusion of mass whims on the sphere of liberty guaranteed by the state.⁸⁵

This, too, was racialized, in that Burgess viewed those demanding economic regulation as “foreign” or corrupted by “foreign elements” and therefore as outside that protected sphere of liberty. In an 1895 essay titled “The Ideal of the American Commonwealth,” Burgess characterized America as “already based upon ideal principles” and as having “advanced many stages in an ideal development.” For this reason, he wrote, “we are compelled” to view people favoring a “revolution” of that system “as the enemies in principle of the American republic and of the political civilization of the world.”⁸⁶

Three sources threatened such revolution: sectionalism, “pollution” by “non-Aryan elements,” and “so-called socialistic movements.” Sectionalism, while largely defeated in the Civil War, had demonstrated its terrible power in that conflict and still threatened in the form of Populism. For their part, the threats of non-Aryan pollution and socialism were linked by the fact that “looking to government” was a (Southern- and Eastern-) “European habit.” The strength of socialism in the United States, then, was owed to “the immense immigration into our population of that very element of Europe’s population to which such propositions appeal.”⁸⁷

These threats led Burgess, despite his suspicion of regulatory measures and zeal for liberty, to embrace a draconian interpretation of government’s police powers in some cases.⁸⁸ The element that threatened American liberty by importing socialistic ideas also constituted a threat by its very nature—the disorder to which those non-Aryan European populations were prone might be a justification for increased governmental capacity on a permanent basis. This meant that the “conclusions of practical politics” that followed from state theory included the “prime policy”—indeed, “duty”—of a modern constitutional government “to attain proper physical boundaries and to render its population ethnically homogeneous,” thereby following “the indications of nature and aid[ing] the ethnical impulse to conscious development.” Similarly, government could permissibly “insist … upon the use of a common language and upon the establishment of homogeneous institutions and laws.” This could include the use of force, which when put to such ends, was “not only justifiable … but morally obligatory.” Government might, for example, “righteously deport” any “ethnically hostile population,” and ought to secure borders against “deleterious” foreign influences.⁸⁹ Identifying “disorderly” with racialized groups allowed Burgess to embrace both liberty (for the uncorrupted Teutons) and authoritarianism (for everyone else).

One of Burgess’s prize pupils, Richmond Mayo-Smith, took a similar position in his extensive work on immigration. This is perhaps even more striking in Mayo-Smith’s case. While no radical, Mayo-Smith took far more moderate and labor-friendly political stances than his mentor. So his views are harder to dismiss as a pure rationalization of reactionary ideology.

A statistician and political economist, Mayo-Smith was among the founders of the American Economic Association (AEA). Richard T. Ely had founded the AEA in 1885 in order to create a home for institutionalist economics, an alternative to neoclassical theory that was friendlier to stateled reform efforts. As Ely put it in an early mission statement for the group, the neoclassical principle of laissez-faire was “unsafe in politics and unsound in morals.”⁹⁰ Mayo-Smith was a moderate figure—in fact Ely recruited him, along with E. R. A. Seligman, another moderately reformist Columbia-affiliated economist, in part to soften any image of the AEA as a home for left politics. Still, Mayo-Smith viewed the question of government regulation as a matter of expediency more than principle, seeking to develop statistical methods that could evaluate policy initiatives on a case-by-case basis. He also evinced considerably more solicitude for the working classes than Burgess did, developing close ties to labor and to the settlement house movement.⁹¹ Nonetheless, this solicitude only applied to racially acceptable members of the working class, and especially to those who were already present on U.S. soil.

Mayo-Smith deployed the framework of state theory against the claim that universal, natural rights claims might be relevant to immigration policy. Like Burgess, he cast the very notion of such rights as a misunderstanding, born of a narrowness of vision that mistakes the present state of things for eternal truth. In his view, rights and liberties were “merely historical,” a grant conferred by a state that “may also withdraw it.” And even if such rights had developed, they would be trumped by America’s “duty to humanity” to exclude “the depraved dregs of European civilization” and thereby to see to it “that civilization progresses.”⁹²

Indeed, America’s immigrant past could only properly be understood within this framework of progress. In its earlier, lower state of civilization, America needed foreign population to claim the continent’s vast resources. The harshness of the early period of settlement mitigated the danger of welcoming that labor since the difficult conditions of the early years fortunately “kill[ed] off a large number of those consigned” to them. Even so, as a nation progressed, Mayo-Smith argued, it lost its “capacity of absorbing the lower elements of other civilizations,” and America was “getting to the limit set by nature” for the “work” of offering “opportunity to the poor and degraded of Europe.” This did not represent a loss, however, because humanity’s interest did not lie in the fate of its degraded members but rather in that of its elite: the “duty of every nation” was “to see to it that the higher civilization triumphs over the lower” by “preserving its own civilization against the disintegrating forces of barbarism.”⁹³

A similar logic explains why Burgess, who pronounced fulsomely on the duties of the Teutonic nations to have “a colonial policy,” opposed expansion of American empire overseas when that became a practical possibility.⁹⁴ Burgess described the Spanish-American War and subsequent annexation of the Philippines as “the first great shock” of his professional career and, along with his colleagues, devoted many pages of the Columbia-based Political Science Quarterly (PSQ) to arguments against such a premature adventure.⁹⁵ In a typical passage, Burgess wrote, “So long as we do not inhabit two-thirds of the territory on this continent; so long as we have not explored, much less exploited, its resources; so long as we remain in large measure a mixed population of Americans, Europeans and Africans; … so long as we have an Indian problem and a Mormon problem and a negro problem, to say nothing of many less important questions—so long, it seems to me, we should more nearly follow the natural order of things, if we should remain at home and attend to our own domestic affairs.”⁹⁶

Burgess’s “despondency and despair” at the American declaration of war was a response also to what he perceived as the eagerness of the business class to promote war “for the sake of profiteering by the vast increase of governmental expenditures.” Quite apart from the greed this displayed, Burgess believed those expenditures and the demands of war would occasion an unwarranted increase in government (as opposed to “state”) power. Also, much like the greedy nationalism to which the antebellum South had fallen prey, this fervor for war would divert from the progress of American liberty by adding the burdens of colonial administration and a new, racially inferior population. Particularly distressing was “to see that Americans were, after all, a warlike people, superficially informed, and easy to incite on Quixotic enterprises.” That is, the best representatives of the American nation had not, as expected, advocated limited government and the further Aryanization of the American population as a principled stand, irrespective of baser motives.⁹⁷

Burgess’s shock that the American business class might put profit over principle may seem naïve (even if the principle in question was a commitment to racial purity). At the same time, it highlights the degree to which Burgess saw the world in racialized terms—the Teutonic genius was meant to show itself in that race’s best men, and if America’s upper classes couldn’t be trusted to make sound and sober judgments, even in the face of recent experience and scientific advance, this would be a serious blow. However, the point is not to evaluate the strength of Burgess’s analysis. It is, rather, that Burgess’s “attempt to apply the method, which has been found so productive in the domain of Natural Science, to Political Science and Jurisprudence” relied centrally on the idea that historical progress was racial progress.⁹⁸

By the turn of the twentieth century, Burgess’s work would come to seem increasingly old-fashioned. A younger generation of political scientists, including future U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, would reject Burgess’s intellectual style and many of his conclusions. Nevertheless, many of the racial ideas shaping the older man’s thought would recur in his successors’ work, and others would be only subtly recast. As the next chapters will show, the idea that organic, racialized “peoples” were the protagonists of history and the true subjects of democracy would outlive the Hegelianism in which state theory had embedded it. And no less than their teachers, many younger political scientists would put the racial “lessons” of the Civil War and Reconstruction at the center of a scientific account of politics.