Race and the Making of American Political Science. Jessica Blatt

       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