Violent Saviors, page 20
There was no effort here to civilize the semicivilized Eastern European whites; the goal was just to keep them out to protect the civilization of American whites. The former AEA President Walker had helped launch the immigration restriction movement, which was alarmed by the entry of those called the beaten races and sought to halt such entry. The restrictionists would eventually attain their goal of drastic reductions in immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. They got their national (effectively racial) quotas in the Immigration Act of 1924.41
Instead of the old advocacy for removing Black people and Indians from the US, immigration controllers would keep the uncivilized people out of the US in the first place. The coercion to keep people out was much less than to expel people already here. Controls on immigration are common in many societies then and now. The most illiberal part of the restriction movement was the invocation of permanent racial characteristics as a basis for restriction. This was deeply insulting to the dignity of the proscribed races, as subsequent events would show.
Walker died in 1897, but another AEA economist, John Commons, took over his cause of immigration restriction. Commons had studied at Johns Hopkins University during Richard T. Ely’s time there. After Ely moved to Wisconsin, he got Commons a chair at Wisconsin in 1899. Ely cited Commons’s work on immigration as qualification for the chair. Commons later became president of the AEA.42
Commons is forgotten today, but in his time his 1907 magnum opus, Races and Immigrants in America, was influential. In it, Commons lumped together many different groups into one aggregate of “backward, thriftless, and unintelligent races.”43
Catholics from Europe were “almost a distinct race,” whom Commons compared to Black people. The border of civilization in Europe separated Scandinavia, Britain, Germany, and France from Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Turkey, partially overlapping with the late eighteenth-century boundary between Western and Eastern Europe. The differences between the “thrifty peasantry” to the north and west and the unthrifty “Latin, Slav, Semitic, and Mongolian races” to the south and east determined the border. Commons had reinvented yet again the West and Rest distinction within Europe.44
Commons embraced the theory of innate incapacity for the Rest. For example, the Africans were “indolent,” and “improvident,” said Commons, with childbearing decisions determined by “strong sexual passion.” Their formerly enslaved descendants in America shared these preferences, which Commons thought explained the lack of Black progress over the four decades since emancipation.45
He revived the idea of benevolent slavery. Commons thought the antebellum Southern planters had been “friend and protector” to their slaves. Blacks needed compulsion to work: Emancipation had failed to correct the “savagery” of the African diaspora in America.46
By way of empirical facts, Commons cited a study of the racial origins of a list of eminent Americans. Out of 14,423 of these eminences, England had produced 10,376. Russia and Poland each accounted for one. None were from Hungary, Africa, or Asia.47
Like Ely, Commons also sought to explain poverty among native whites in America. Commons defined the poor-white group geographically, with their region variously identified as the hills, the South, West Virginia, the Appalachians, the frontier, or the Blue Ridge Mountains. This assortment of locations matched the historical use of the “white trash” label (as it still does today). Commons demonstrated excessive childbearing in West Virginia with an extensive sampling of two observations, both mountain couples in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The alarmingly prolific two couples had eighteen and twenty-two children, respectively. Mountaineers were also lazy and spendthrift.48
Commons on a few occasions applied his views on innate differences between groups to the sexes. He affirmed that women were not good for factory work because of their “carelessness, ill temper, and unreliability.” He wanted to restrain low-quality white women from excessive procreation. The job of higher-quality white women was to raise high-quality white children. Commons approvingly quoted Theodore Roosevelt’s critique of “the women,” that if they “do not recognize that the greatest thing for any woman is to be a good wife and mother, why that nation has cause to be alarmed about its future.”49
Commons and Roosevelt expressed some concern that women would not make the right choices on their own. Lawmakers agreed. Forty US states between 1909 and 1919 restricted hours for female workers. Commons later in his career opposed the Equal Rights Amendment because, he said, women’s “physiological differences” required laws to protect them. Women were yet another group that needed upper-class white men to protect them.50
The postclassical economists’ rejection of laissez-faire lines up today with the familiar debate between the left, which wants government intervention and the right, which wants free markets. Yet it lined up historically with a debate less familiar to modern eyes, between the proponents of laissez-faire and advocates of state action on Indian reservations, immigration restrictions, Black segregation, restrictions on women, and eugenics.
What had happened to the liberal opposition to empire? Where were the liberal economists in all this? There were few of them left, and they would be on the fringe for many decades after. Liberals were going to be faced with a great expansion in European empires. The next chapter turns to an example of an American economist in 1898 who opposed American colonization of the Philippines.
12
America in the Philippines and the New Colonial Expansion
On January 16, 1899, the economist William Graham Sumner gave a speech on US colonization of the Philippines. The fifty-eight-year-old Yale professor of political economy came out of early retirement to deliver this speech before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Yale. On May 1, 1898, during a short war between Spain and the United States, US Admiral George Dewey had defeated a Spanish armada to capture the Philippines. Sumner spoke as the US Senate considered whether to ratify a treaty with Spain that included the US taking possession of the islands. Sumner had joined the American Anti-Imperialist League that advocated rejection of the treaty in the fall of 1898.1
The colonization supporters said that they would offer benevolent rule to promote what they called the Filipinos’ “national development.” To Sumner, it was abhorrent to say, “We know what is good for you better than you know yourself and we are going to make you do it.” Now that Americans had ended Spain’s oppressive colonial rule in the Philippines, they should just endorse independence. Sumner was an heir to Adam Smith’s anti-colonial critique, but such heirs were becoming much rarer and more marginalized.2
It was a turning point for America’s role in the world, a last chance to pull back from imperialism abroad. America had until then stuck to the liberal nonintervention foreign policy set by George Washington and John Quincy Adams, with admittedly some not-so-tiny exceptions like conquering Indian nations, Liberia, and Mexico. America’s new apostasy would be part of a major expansion of colonial empires in the late nineteenth century.
The American Economic Association founders had singled Sumner out as the kind of economist they did not want to be. He was way too much a proponent of laissez-faire both at home and abroad. For his part, he had refused to join the AEA because of its rejection of laissez-faire. In an earlier essay in 1894, Sumner had derided the AEA economists for succumbing to “the greatest folly of which a man can be capable, to sit down with a slate and pencil to plan out a new social world.”3
Sumner was for nonintervention, for doing nothing, a hard sell at the best of times. But the case for Doing Nothing depends on what Doing Something looks like. Sumner thought that America’s newfound colonialism was indeed worse than Doing Nothing.
America’s colonization of the Philippines occurred soon after a peak in Western colonial violence. Modern estimates find that the number of new violent conquests peaked in the 1880s, and new violence continued in the 1890s.4
In retrospect, the classical economists had left an ambiguous legacy on the morality of colonialism, as we saw with James Mill in the chapter on Benjamin Constant. While Adam Smith had condemned British rule in India, James Mill’s son, John Stuart Mill, defended it. In his great classic On Liberty in 1859, the younger Mill at first gave one of economists’ strongest rebukes to paternalism, which anticipated Sumner’s critique. Nobody had the right to coerce an individual for his own good; compulsion was acceptable only to prevent people from harming others. “He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear” actions just because “it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right.”5
Mill had demonstrated his opposition to paternalism in his arguments against benevolent slavery with Thomas Carlyle. Did he also oppose the paternalism of colonial governments toward their non-white subjects? Right after his soaring defense of individual rights against paternalism in On Liberty, Mill made a crucial exception that broke the hearts of some of his later admirers. He denied that the case for liberty applied to “those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage.” Mill argued that “despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.”6
This passage left a lasting stain on liberalism. The Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra in 2020 would cite this passage from Mill to argue that “Liberal ideas in the West” justified colonialism. These ideas “did not seem particularly liberal to the peoples subjugated by British, French and American imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”7
How to reconcile this passage with Mill’s denunciation of theories of innate racial inferiority? The crucial phrase here is “backward states of society” compared to individuals in “a civilised community.” While Mill rejected the idea that some races were innately backward, whole societies could be backward compared to a civilized community. Although not fully spelled out, Mill seems close to the argument still around today that some societies are not ready for political rights. They don’t have the unspecified ingredients necessary for a “free and equal discussion.” The outcome of political freedom would be bad, because these societies cannot be trusted to implement the institutions that will enable “spontaneous progress.” Mill’s moral vision on slavery allowed him to reject the slave owners’ and Carlyle’s claims of material improvement of the slaves as irrelevant. The same vision failed him on colonialism, where improvement justified despotism.
Although this passage does not mention colonization, Mill had made clear elsewhere his favorable reviews of British rule in India. Like his father, Mill actually worked for the East India Company, and he gave his employer credit for an “amount of good government produced which is truly wonderful considering the circumstances and the materials.” Mill enthused that “it has been the destiny of the government of the East India Company to suggest the true theory of the government of a semi-barbarous dependency by a civilized country.”8
Back at the AEA, many of America’s newly professionalized social scientists were with Mill rather than Sumner. The AEA in 1899 appointed a committee to study US policy in the Philippines, as the decision on American colonization was still up for grabs. Led by Cornell Professor Jeremiah Jenks, the committee endorsed autocratic colonial rule in the Philippines: “The desires of the United States Government, expressed by the proper authority, are to be paramount and its decisions final.”9
Political science associations also gave expressions of support for American imperialism. The annual meeting of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (AAPSS) in 1899 featured a symposium on “The Foreign Policy of the United States: Political and Commercial.” Like economists, political scientists were increasingly professionalized as scientists through organizations like the AAPSS, founded in 1889. Yale international law Professor Theodore Woolsey commented in the symposium on US colonialism. The US military should act as “a benevolent despot” to create the environment for development. We should not guarantee political rights for Filipinos. Such rights should “be put out of reach, like edged tools rescued from children’s hands,” Woolsey said.10
Another participant in the AAPSS annual meeting, Alleyne Ireland, published in 1899 a book titled Tropical Colonization. In it, Ireland argued that colonizers needed to force Black people in the West Indies and Africa to work. He said that colonizers had no choice but to get Black people out of their “lazy backwardness.” Likewise, he opined that Americans in their new colony of the Philippines had to do something to advance the development of Filipinos notorious for their laziness.11
Ireland presented another paper on colonialism at the American Political Science Association annual meeting in 1906, “On the Need for a Scientific Study of Colonial Administration.” Ireland deplored the “torrent of ignorant and often violently prejudiced writing” produced by those who lacked the scientific credentials that he himself brought to the subject, which included travels to the Caribbean, South America, India, and Ceylon.
Ireland argued that “the subjection of one race under the rule of another” was justifiable because the ruling race would achieve “the right of the world as a whole to enjoy the natural resources of the whole earth.” Speaking for The World, Ireland said this global enjoyment could happen only if each territory developed and traded its products internationally.
So, Ireland asked, what if an Indigenous government failed to provide the property rights and contract enforcement necessary for development of its own territory? What if the territory failed to trade internationally? Any government “greatly inferior to the best type” was eligible for takeover. Alleyne Ireland pointed out that “native rule in the tropics” had failed to achieve the “development of the resources of the territory.” Therefore, the ruling race must appoint itself to replace native rule. Ireland was most concerned with developing the conquered land rather than the people. However, he claimed that colonizers should also try to achieve “the general betterment” of the subject races.12
The case for American rule in the Philippines could also be set to rhyme. Rudyard Kipling published his classic poem “The White Man’s Burden” in February 1899 to persuade Americans to embrace their colonial mission in the Philippines. As in modern times, the 1899 development debate included celebrities as well as social scientists.
Instead of the white man doing nothing for the non-white world, he should:
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
The West should heroically persevere when the Rest resisted progress:
Take up the White Man’s burden—
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:—
“Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?”
It was light versus darkness. The colonizers brought the West’s “light” to replace the Rest’s “night.”
The white conquerors terrorized the half-devil and half-child people for their own good:
Take up the White Man’s Burden—
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain,
To seek another’s profit,
And work another’s gain.
The Kipling development goals included peace, nutrition, and health:
Take up the White Man’s burden—
The savage wars of peace—
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease.13
Born in Bombay in 1865, Kipling had observed imperial benevolence firsthand in India. Not all the Indian beneficiaries were fans of the empire or of Kipling. A contemporary of Kipling was the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). On December 31, 1900, almost two years after Kipling published “The White Man’s Burden,” Tagore published in Bengali a poem, “The Sunset of the Century.” Where Kipling had seen a picture of nineteenth-century progress, with night giving way to light, Tagore saw the opposite—colonialism was a sunset instead of a sunrise. The red sky to Tagore indicated violence, and the violence did not exactly bring progress: “The sun of the century is setting to-day in clouds of blood— / at the festival of hate to-day, in clashing weapons sounds the maddened, dreadful chant of death.” Tagore closed his poem with an apparent reference to Kipling’s poem that was not very flattering: “Awakening fear, the poet-mobs howl round, / A chant of quarrelling curs on the burning-ground.”14
Tagore received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, six years after Kipling got the same award. It was gratifying for him to be recognized. As Tagore had said in a speech in 1908, the British “are behaving as if we do not exist.” The British “think and act and rule as if we are huge cyphers.” Tagore in 1913 could now celebrate how those giving him the Nobel recognized a two-way flow of good things between East and West, in contrast to Kipling’s purported one-way flow from West to East: “The East and the West ever touch each other like twin gems in the circlet of humanity, that they had met long before Kipling was born and will meet long after his name is forgotten.”15
