Of Fear and Strangers, page 13
In the summer of 1911, lecturers from Japan, China, India, Persia, West and South Africa, and Egypt trekked to London to share their experiences and ideas with scholars and diplomats from Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States. In attendance were prominent intellectuals such as John Dewey, H. G. Wells, John Hobson, Emile Durkheim, Ernst Haeckel, and Georg Simmel. Anthropologists, sociologists, biologists, lawyers, pacifists, socialists, globalists, and other activists also came to consider the sources of interracial conflict. All the foreigners in their traditional robes and exotic finery made for an astonishing sight, one American breathlessly reported, as did the “freaks,” by which he meant those Western “men with long hair and the women with short hair.”
Report on the Universal Races Congress, 1911
In pre-circulated papers, the organizers articulated their mission:
The object of the Congress is “to discuss, in the light of science and the modern conscience, the general relations subsisting between the peoples of the West and those of the East, between so-called white and so-called coloured peoples, with a view to encouraging between them a fuller understanding, the most friendly feelings, and a heartier co-operation.”
The tip-off was that qualifier, “so-called.” For while many came to discuss race, others asked if the very idea was a mistake. The organizers’ preferred answer to this radical question could be deduced from a pre-circulated questionnaire. Was it legitimate to infer mental differences from physical ones? the participants were asked. Were racial characters permanent and unmodifiable? These and other queries seemed reverse-engineered, for one of Adler’s close colleagues, Franz Boas, would unveil data at the congress that answered both questions in the negative.
Boas would be recognized as the anthropologist most responsible for challenging science’s attachment to race and fostering a shift by which racial science dissolved into racism. Like Felix Adler, he was a German Jew who had left behind his nation and his religion. Born in 1858, the son of assimilated parents who ran an import-export store, Boas studied physics and geography during his university years, where he also encountered the anti-Semitic Union of German Students and fought them off with more than his fair share of duels. After receiving his doctorate, he took to the seas to explore far-off lands, in his case the Arctic. His hope, as he wrote to his parents, was to produce a “fairly major geographical work” while doing work on psychophysics, which he expected would win him a university job. After weeks blinded by fog and frozen in ice, Boas’s expedition arrived at Baffin Island, a German outpost among the Inuit people. Among crashing ice and massive fjords, the young man began collecting Inuit words and scribbling notes on their customs. For a year, he observed and photographed these Arctic dwellers, before returning home with a new passion.
On his second expedition, Boas explored British Columbia, then returned via New York and never left. He united with his American fiancée, whom he had met on vacation, and got a job working as an editor at Science magazine. By then, he had come to see culture, not biology, as determinative of morality. In 1889, Boas secured a job at Clark University and, seven years later, he was made both a curator at the American Museum of Natural History and a lecturer in the fledgling discipline of anthropology at Columbia University.
Franz Boas among the Inuit, circa 1884
Boas reached out to Felix Adler and invited him to one of his lectures. On March 30, 1899, Adler sent a warm reply to “Doctor Boas,” apologizing for having a prior commitment but suggesting he would try and steal away, since the subject “interests me immensely.” The two men soon became allies; Adler was proud to have Boas on the “Committee” of the Ethical Culture school, and a decade later, Boas could count Adler as a supporter for a 1906 Festschrift in his honor. For by then, as Adler built his Ethical Culture network, the prodigious Boas had made landmark contributions to linguistics, folklore, and ethnology. However, like Felix Adler, Franz Boas was deeply concerned over sectarian strife, bias, and anti-Semitism. An opponent of racial hierarchies and Social Darwinism, Boas shifted some of his wide-ranging research to examine theories of race. Those two questions that were distributed to the entire congress were ones that Boas had come prepared to answer in his presentation.
“Instability of Human Types” held masses of quantified data that showed how supposedly permanent racial characteristics could be altered by environmental influences. Immigrants to the United States, after a while, found their children’s cephalic index, a supposedly critical scientific distinguisher of race, mushroomed to American size. The longer an immigrant mother had been in the United States, the more her son’s cranium equaled that of his neighbors. If cephalic index was one of the most scientific markers of race, and if mental differences among races were implied from those measurements, then that was all wrong.
Boas’s science buttressed the suspicion shared by others in the Ethical Culture circle. Speaking before the group, Harvard’s Josiah Royce dismissed racial science as all bias and egoism. And at the congress, Boas’s views found an eager audience. The opening speaker, Brajendranath Seal of India, already had argued that racial types were fluid and dynamic. The editor of the congress’s papers, Gustav Spiller, declared that the races displayed no difference in intellect or morality. All that stood between cavemen and those who wielded electricity, he declared, was their respective cultures. The difference between these thinkers and Franz Boas was that he presented reams of data, thereby meeting the science of race on its own ground.
Baron d’Estournelles de Constant wrapped up the proceedings by declaring that racial claims of superiority or inferiority were dangerous illusions. To hammer home that message, congress planners took the extraordinary step of arranging for the publication of Jean Finot’s The Death-Agony of the “Science” of Race. A Jewish Pole who had immigrated to France, Finot considered scientific claims for race to be utterly ridiculous. “The term race,” he wrote, “is but a product of our mental gymnastics.” Races existed “as fictions of our brains.”
If the congress planners were hoping for unanimity, however, they would be disappointed. A star of the congress, the co-secretary of the American delegation, W. E. B. Du Bois, worked within the parameters of race, arguing that the reality of the “Negro” and white races did not need to be questioned to reject false hierarchies. The president of the Royal Anthropological Institute, John Gray, insisted that racial hierarchies had been validated. However, the most ardent defender of racial differences came from Germany. A Berlin professor, Felix von Luschan, extolled the merits of racial science and warned of the dangers that attended mixing with “coarser or less refined elements.” “We are all more or less disposed to dislike and despise a mixture of Europeans with the greater part of the foreign races,” Luschan opined. “The brotherhood of man is a good thing,” he conceded, but it paled before “the struggle for life.” Racial and national antagonisms were natural. As for race war, the German cheerily concluded, it was nothing to dread.
While Luschan struck a discordant note, the Universal Races Congress seemed to be a remarkable success. One reviewer noted that the idea of race was now a question mark. In Science magazine, a Cambridge anthropologist reported that colleagues at the congress now acknowledged there was no pure race, while others concluded race was “chimerical.” Felix Adler returned home having established a worldwide community dedicated to undoing racial prejudice, upholding ideals of human commonality, and reinforcing ethical claims against xenophobic biases. The participants spoke of a new chapter in world relations and planned their next gathering four years hence in Paris, the City of Light.
They would never meet again.
DESPITE THE CHALLENGES of Franz Boas and a growing cadre of like-minded humanists, and scholars, in the decades that followed the congress, it would be Felix von Luschan’s view of strangers that drove history. The outbreak of World War I quickly silenced globalists, anti-imperialists, pacifists, and liberals who formerly had denounced nationalistic and racial xenophobia. In New York, Franz Boas dared to challenge anti-German jingoism, only to be accused of being a traitor and nearly fired from his university post. In a 1915 essay published in The Atlantic, W. E. B. Du Bois argued that the Great War, this “terrible overturning of civilization,” was rooted in European racism and colonial rivalries in Africa. Pressured to desist, he too agreed to censor himself during the war effort. Internationalists and pacifists were worn down by waves of propaganda and the mournful sight of their nation’s boys coming home dead. Idealists like Great Britain’s L. T. Hobhouse soon lined up behind their flag, as the killing exceeded the worst expectations.
The Great War ended a wave of globalization that had helped define the second half of the nineteenth century. During this period, Europe’s population skyrocketed from 188 million to 458 million people; fifty million or so had participated in a migration. “By 1914,” a demographer recently noted, “there was hardly a village or town anywhere on the globe whose prices were not influenced by distant foreign markets, whose infrastructure was not financed by foreign capital, whose engineering, manufacturing, and even business skills were not imported from abroad, or whose labor markets were not influenced by the absence of those who had emigrated or by the presence of strangers who had immigrated.”
At the same time, the warring parties of this global conflict were egged on by mass media, which made the other side into monsters. Fought for four brutal years among self-anointed “civilized” nations of the West, the conflict inaugurated total warfare, interminable trench battles, sudden death by submarine or nerve gas, and over thirty-five million buried, a number so staggering as to freeze the imagination. The 1918 peace brokered at Versailles led not to a full resolution, but rather to years of bitterness and tension. Striding forth like a colossus, American president Woodrow Wilson, whose late entry helped tip the balance of the war, arrived in Paris in 1918 having already presented his Fourteen Points for peace to the United States Congress. Among his points was one that garnered much attention: he demanded a “free, open-minded and absolutely impartial” adjudication of all colonial claims, through negotiations in which the colonized peoples should have an equal say in their fate. H. G. Wells later recalled that the American was treated like a messiah; his message would excite the hopes of Indians, Koreans, Egyptians, and other colonized and stateless peoples.
The last of Wilson’s fourteen points was his call for a League of Nations. This recommendation was granted, though, in a humiliating rebuke to their own president, Congress rejected the plan. The United States never joined the League of Nations, which was immediately charged with numerous tasks, including both settling masses of stateless immigrants and protecting the world’s minorities. The Minorities Section took complaints and sought to negotiate with the accused nation-states. Ironically, the nation that most often petitioned the Minorities Section of the League of Nations for relief in its first years was Germany. In the wake of their defeat, they had six million ethnic compatriots who resided in non-Germanic, eastern nations. Meanwhile, the problem of unwanted refugees wandering about Europe became acute. As the huge multilingual Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires crumbled, more than one exodus commenced. The Russian revolution sent more than one million “White Russians” into flight; Turkish atrocities against Armenian Christians, Assyrians, and Chaldeans led to their desperate departures. Millions of exiles lined up at Europe’s borders in search of asylum, and as they sought help, doors began to slam shut. Debates over whether it was possible to assimilate strangers—many of another race—now became a matter of life or death. The League of Nations issued so-called Nansen passports to the stateless, the first being hundreds of thousands of Russians living abroad, stripped of their national identity by the newly formed Soviet Union. After a mighty effort to resettle half a million prisoners of war, the League’s meager resources ran out.
In 1927, the League of Nations tried to again step in, this time by creating a universal standard for the treatment of immigrants. The presence of displaced foreigners, officials noted, raised complex juridical, demographic, economic, social, and cultural questions. Xenophobia, it was noted, could be stoked in such circumstances, based on trumped-up ethnic and national rivalries, as well as claims of biologic difference, which the league bluntly labeled “racism.” A third category of bias was created for Russians, targeted for their political beliefs. Still, in the end, not one practical proposition was adopted.
The problem of exiles in search of asylum grew as European countries passed laws that allowed them to strip whomever they deemed “undesirable” of citizenship. Vladimir Lenin’s Soviet Union inaugurated this denaturalization process; it spread to Benito Mussolini’s Italy, Raymond Poincaré’s France, and Adolf Hitler’s Germany. By simple decree, nations denied minorities their passports and their identity. Overnight, an “undesirable” was no longer Soviet, German, or French, but a man or woman of no country.
While dignitaries at the League of Nations decried the xenophobia at the core of restrictive immigration policies, the very extremity of these laws created a vicious cycle. As the quantity of deportees and displaced persons skyrocketed, their presence at another border en masse seemed to be a burden, even a threat. Fervent nationalists deemed restrictions ever more necessary. In 1926, the French newspaper Le Matin ran a front-page article that complained of refugees who taxed French hospitality, hospitals, and prisons. Such perceptions prompted calls for more expulsions and tighter borders, which kept this noose tightening.
Internationalists who dragged themselves out from their bunkers after 1918 tried to douse the fiery beliefs that still lingered after all this senseless slaughter. “Xenophobia is rampant in Europe,” a Dutchman warned in the New York Times. “Xenophobia is an ugly word,” another wrote in 1924, “and it represents something that is still uglier. Almost all countries from time to time develop a dislike of the foreigner which may even amount to hatred. France is no exception.…” In Great Britain, one of the leaders of the Labour Party believed that the war had destroyed the “spirit of tolerance.” Now it was too easy to stir up a panic against strangers. “We do not have the Black Hundreds or the pogroms in England,” he wrote. “In their place is the Xenophobia.”
Early on, the great Black American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois predicted that the central problem of the twentieth century would be “the problem of the color-line.” As the century progressed, this prophecy could be expanded to include the religious line, the ethnic line, and the ideological line. Xenophobia was a violent form of zealotry, one of the greatest evils of the times. In an ever-more interconnected world, if strangers were enemies, the state of war would be permanent.
A gathering storm seemed to presage such a fate. In 1935, a call went out for the international community to address “world-wide xenophobia” targeting many different outcasts. A year later, an immigration expert for the League of Nations declared that Europe seemed to be in a “general panic” against foreigners. In 1939, another noted that the globe was now subject to “wave after wave of xenophobia.” Jean Martin de Saintours’ accusation could now be heard in English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and German. Anyone keeping tabs would learn of Fascist and Soviet xenophobia; anti-Semitic and American xenophobia; Italian, French, Norwegian, Arab, Japanese, and Chinese xenophobia. There was political xenophobia, religious, administrative, and trade unionist xenophobia, examples of anti-capitalist, anti-Western, and “reactionary” xenophobia here, and anti-Communist and nationalist xenophobia there. It seemed the world was crazily dividing up and attacking itself like cancerous cells. But what caused this? The old racist answers were useless, for if there was any wild hopping up and down, any chanting around a ritual murder, the incantations were less likely to be in Swahili than in German.
EVEN BEFORE Germany’s abject defeat in 1918, racial theories and anti-Semitism were especially rampant in that country as well as in the Austro-Hungarian empire. After World War I, these believers in their own inherent Aryan superiority watched in horror as they lost their colonies, saw their currency destroyed, and found themselves occupied by Belgians and Frenchmen. Even worse, they awoke to discover they had been “colonized” by Slavs and Poles, all degraded inferiors. For a nation that had become the third-largest colonizer in the world, this was a humiliating reversal.
Germany’s path from fledgling nation to global power had been rapid. In 1871, the Imperial German state emerged from a rough patchwork of duchies, grand duchies, kingdoms, and principalities, filled with different dialects and local allegiances. The Reich was beset by endless internal rivalries. Chancellor Bismarck focused on national unification and followed the ancient strategy of rousting up and demonizing enemies within. He pitted the nation against Catholics, Jews, Poles, and revolutionary Socialists. Bismarck deftly isolated the liberal opposition by ranting against minorities, then cleaved them in two by taking up colonial expansion. A Greater Germany in the East awaited the nation, he declared. They would colonize Polish lands and create financial incentives for Germans to move in.
In pursuit of these objectives, liberal ideals of toleration, pluralism, and peaceful coexistence faded. Racial biology had chosen winners and losers, and it was the duty of the Aryans to win. To do this, they must stay pure. “The first commandment,” one writer opined, “is: ‘No racial mixing with aliens.’ ” Colonization needed to be accompanied by vigorous campaigns against Magyarization, Russification, Slavification, and Judification. Like the Spanish centuries earlier, this young mongrel nation made purity a rallying cry.
