“My Method Is Reading!” Part 2 of an Interview with Jessica Blatt

Andy Seal (AS): Race and the Making of American Political Science is a rigorously original contribution to one of the most important bodies of scholarship in intellectual history: the history of the disciplines. It starts in the late nineteenth century at a time when historians and political scientists didn’t see themselves as engaged in totally distinct endeavors. Woodrow Wilson, Simeon Baldwin, Albert Bushnell Hart, William A. Dunning, and Charles Beard were all presidents of both the American Political Science Association (APSA) and the American Historical Association (AHA). Can you tell us a bit about what kinds of factors or features allowed that kind of overlap, and what led to their increasing distinctness? Did ideas about race play a role in giving practitioners a common outlook, or were there differences?

Jessica Blatt (JB): You are completely right of course that disciplinary boundaries in what we now think of as the social sciences and history were fuzzy in the late nineteenth century, which is where my book picks up the story. And in some ways what you see unfolding over the course of the book is the shifting of disciplinary borders.

For someone like Burgess, and for most political scientists in those early decades, historical, political, and racial development were simply aspects of the same thing. Herbert Baxter Adams, who we remember as a historian but whose intellectual projects wasn’t that different from Burgess’s, famously said that “history is past politics.” And he was a major proponent of “Teutonic germ theory.” Merriam and others were very explicit that what they were trying to do was move political science away from history and into more collaboration with the natural sciences, which for them included psychology and anthropology. At one point Merriam insists that he does not mean to suggest that political scientists “ask their older friends to go”—he is referring to history and law—but that was precisely what he was doing. He wouldn’t have had to say it if he wasn’t. But what I found so interesting and revelatory was that when they distanced themselves from Teutonism or Anglo-Saxonist history, the problem was the historicism, not the racism.

So there is a very explicit attempt in the 1920s to carve out a science of politics that is distinct from political history. Racial ideas and racism shaped both traditions, but in different ways. And racial ideas, race science, and the institutions promoting race science, including foundations and the National Research Council, for example, are very much at the heart of the shift that happens in the 1920s.

AS: One of the things I found most fascinating about your book was how you use academic journals as texts, treating them as both a collection of individually authored articles, each with their own perspectives and objectives, and as a more unified textual object with an overarching agenda and worldview, something that develops over time through sequential issues. It was a very sophisticated and instructive approach. Would you say a little about your methods for dealing with, say, the Journal of Race Development?

JB: I’m not sure that was a conscious method, to be honest. I suppose to an extent I was primed to look for the different outlets’ editorial lines — I worked in publishing for a time so I have a bit of a sense how those emerge, usually informally. And we all navigate this to an extent in our professional lives, right? We all have an idea of what sorts of things, methodologically or even politically, different journals may be looking for or willing to tolerate, or of why something would appear in one journal rather than another. And we can identify the stamps of different editors or editorial teams on the journals we read, and notice how those change over time. So that would have been in the back of my mind. But really, that approach to journals was more a byproduct of wrestling with some of the problems inherent in this kind of work.

One of the biggest of those was the unclear disciplinary boundaries you just highlighted, especially in the first few decades. Because the field was still taking shape, it was hard to know where to look, which of course creates all kinds of problems of selection bias. How would I know I wasn’t just defining ideas and people in or out of the discipline based on what I was looking for? I knew there would be some individuals I’d have to focus on, since the existing historiography made it clear that people like Burgess and Merriam were explicitly engaged in discipline building and exerted real influence. At the same time, too much focus on a handful of individual writers compounds the selection bias problem, especially when my ambition was to say something about how the field itself was coming to be constituted. So journals, and to a lesser extent conferences, seemed like more or less well demarcated sites that might help me get at what people engaged in political scholarship were reading and talking about. Also I took journals to be instruments or agents of discipline construction, to the extent they functioned to certify particular ideas and approaches as being worthy of the attention of other scholars interested in the questions they raised and then to circulate them. I also figured if I took a pretty maximalist approach to the journals I would essentially be forced to encounter work that wasn’t what I was looking for or wouldn’t conform to my expectations. In effect it was the journal editors doing the selecting, not me, or at least not just me.

So I didn’t just do keyword searches or read particular people—of course I went back to the journals in those more targeted ways and read more deeply in certain people’s work to answer specific questions I developed over the course of the project. But to begin with I basically sat down and read or at least skimmed everything that the American Political Science Review published for about its first decade, for example. Same with a big chunk of the Journal of Race Development and only slightly less obsessively, with Political Science Quarterly, which was the older journal that came out of the Columbia department. I read a lot from other journals too, but those three are the ones that got the treatment you describe.

Political Science Quarterly and the American Political Science Review were obvious choices because they were the most tightly identified with the discipline-building project. The Journal of Race Development was actually a bit of an outlier. I included it actually because it was more distinctive. It wasn’t explicitly connected to an effort to carve out something called “political science” the way those other journals were—it was closer to what we would call area studies—but  it took some of the same ideas about race and history that political scientists were applying to questions of imperialism and colonial administration in a very different direction. The short version is that most political scientists writing about colonial administration in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century framed their task as understanding and accommodating the limitations that subject people’s racial traits and evolutionary status put on their ability to self-govern. The ethos of the Journal of Race Development was more to suggest that yes, political and social arrangements reflected racial traits, but that competent, sympathetic, scientific administration might be able to sort of speed up racial evolution and allow for at least the possibility of some more equal kinds of relationships between peoples. So I thought it was worth exploring how different groups of scholars took similar ideas in these different directions. And also how this group of (mostly but not all white) intellectuals with relatively progressive political impulses were still very much invested in an utterly racialized worldview.

So of course I ended up reading a lot of things that didn’t end up being relevant. But in the course of that immersion I really did begin to get a sense of each of those journals as conversations or series of interventions that took place within certain limits, and tended toward some set of broadly defined ambitions or principles, and I could notice when those limits or ambitions began to shift.

In the case of the American Political Science Review I was also able to get some clues as to the kind of gatekeeping its editors were engaged in, at least early on. That’s because before the journal was launched in 1906 and for a few years after, the American Political Science Association published conference proceedings, which meant that I could see most if not all of what people prepared for those conferences. And the early numbers of the Review featured a lot of cleaned-up versions of those conference presentations, and what was included and what was not was instructive. For example, as I discuss in the book, there was a panel on Reconstruction and its aftermath at the 1905 meeting of the American Political Science Association. Two of the three presenters justified segregation and basically argued that racial “realities” meant that nobody should really take the 14th Amendment too seriously. A third was a pretty mild defense of Reconstruction that suggested that some kind of racial equality might be achievable. The first two papers appeared in the inaugural issue of the journal the next year; the third did not. So that seemed like a useful clue as to which positions were mainstream and which were marginal or beyond the pale.

So I am not sure if that answers your question. I’m reminded of a probably apocryphal story I heard about a particularly fraught faculty meeting in the Politics department of the New School for Social Research, where I studied, in which one professor is said to have exploded with something like, “You want to know my method? My method is reading!” But I do think you are right that it is useful to think about journals in the manner you describe, particularly for purposes of disciplinary history. I took a similar approach to Merriam and Barnes’s History of Political Theories and the other “state of the field” volumes that began to appear in the 1920s. To me they were useful collections of political scholarship that had some kind of stamp of approval from important people, but taken as a whole they seemed to be documents of the ambition of the editors and contributors—a way to see what kind of discipline they hoped to create.

AS: Your work also is situated in that interdisciplinary borderland. Your book has a dream team of blurbers, for instance—two from political science (Adolph Reed, Jr. and Corey Robin) and two from history (Dorothy Ross and Howard Brick). Our readers are almost certainly familiar with Reed and Robin, but who are some other political theorists or political scientists whom you think (intellectual) historians really ought to be reading?

JB: Well thank you for noticing the blurbers. I am pretty excited about them. In fact, though, you missed the one from Duana Fullwiley, who is an anthropologist of science. And if I’m making recommendations as someone doing disciplinary history, I’d have to say I took a lot of inspiration from Science and Technology Studies, and particularly from the insistence in a lot of the best STS work on embedding ideas in the material conditions of their production—on going to the lab, basically. That is what led me to foundation archives, for example, and to thinking about research funding, which I do a lot of in the last chapter of the book. I even spent some time looking at building plans — for the Social Science building at the University of Chicago that Charles Merriam helped to spearhead. He had all these ideas for collaboration between political researchers and natural scientists and psychologists, and you could see them mapped out in how he wanted to group people and the kinds of facilities he wanted available.

All of that got me thinking about some failed projects—things that people tried to do but didn’t manage. Like Merriam’s hopes for collaboration with eugenics researchers, which got a lot of space in his correspondence, particularly around potential funding, but only appear as hints in the published work. What they tried but failed to accomplish said a lot about the political imaginary that animated the more successful, lasting projects. For example I document direct connections between those hopes about eugenics and the development of political psychology.

One political theorist/disciplinary historian who pays attention to those kinds of “backstage” dynamics in interesting ways is Nicolas Guilhot. In fact I reviewed his book The Invention of International Relations Theory for this site a while back. Robert Vitalis is someone else I’d recommend. He is an international relations scholar whose work on racism and the history of that field was really important for me as I was beginning this project. And it’s always attentive in interesting ways to  how the everyday academic stuff—departmental politics, rivalries, and all those sorts of things—affect what knowledge gets produced and gets traction, and what doesn’t.