Teutonic Germs and Race Realism: An Interview with Jessica Blatt

Andy Seal [AS]: After reading your book, it’s almost impossible for me to remember that, for many political scientists and for many social scientists in general, the history of their discipline can be told without a substantial engagement with the racist ideas it promulgated. What were some of those racist ideas, and is there one key figure or even one key primary source that encapsulates some of the book’s larger arguments?

Jessica Blatt [JB]: To be fair, there is great work out there on race and the history of the social sciences, especially but not only of anthropology and sociology. Political science has been late to this, but an important literature has been developing on race and the history of international relations theory. So I think it is getting harder to tell the story of the social sciences without race. But I’m glad if my book contributes to that difficulty. It is certainly meant to do so.

As for a figure or text that encapsulates some of the main arguments, it would probably be Charles Merriam, and a “state of the field”-type book that he put together with Harry Elmer Barnes in the 1920s, called History of Political Theories, Recent Times.  It’s a very strange book, I think because it captures a transition and some uncertainty and flux in the field, and how racial ideas and race science figured into that transition.

Many readers I think will be familiar with Merriam. Along with his work as an academic, he was a prominent Chicago progressive and New Dealer, with a pretty astonishing range of connections—he pops up in all kinds of accounts of mid-twentieth-century American liberalism. But he left probably his biggest mark in the social sciences, and especially in political science. Political scientists remember him as a sort of scientific revolutionary—the person who did the most to encourage the use of empirical methods, statistics, etc., in political scholarship, and the “grandfather of behavioralism”—many of the the stars of that movement came out of the Chicago department Merriam led or studied with people he had mentored there.

So if Merriam was a precursor of behavioralism, History of Political Theories was a sort of minor manifesto. Nominally it was a Festschrift for William Dunning, with whom Merriam and the other contributors had studied at Columbia. But—and anyone familiar with Dunning’s work will see the irony here—it contains a number of strong critiques of racial theories of politics and history that had been foundational to the discipline.

Some of the critique is aimed at John W. Burgess, who is a founding father of university-based political science in the United States. Burgess was a mentor and colleague of Dunning’s at Columbia; in fact Dunning spent his career in the department that Burgess founded there in 1880—the first in the country to grant doctoral degrees in political science.

Burgess was a proponent of “Teutonism” or “Teutonic germ” theory. It was essentially a mix of Hegelian historicism and late-19th century racial anthropology. For Teutonists, the U.S. political system represented the highest development of an Anglo-Saxon “genius for liberty.” Political life was the expression of a racial soul and history was the record of racial development; some races had the capacity and were destined to develop free political institutions.  Everyone else would eventually be forcefully “organized” by the superior, “political nations” or disappear entirely. And in fact this was the paradigmatic theory of politics in the early years that the discipline was taking root in the university system. It didn’t stay entirely intact for long. The first generation of American-trained political scientists—people like Woodrow Wilson—rejected the historicism, and especially the sense that, as Wilson said, Teutonism “left nothing for [them] to do,” since political life was just developing according to its nature. But I think Merriam and his colleagues writing in the 1920s correctly perceived that Wilson’s generation never quite managed to get out from under the idea that political history and racial evolution were basically one and the same—they recast that idea in more materialist, bio-social evolutionary terms, but didn’t quite dismantle it. And by the 1920s for a number of reasons Merriam and others were starting to find ideas like “racial character” to be “traditional,” “authoritarian,” and unscientific modes of explanation. They were looking for finer-grained accounts of political difference that depended less on sweeping, evolutionary narratives and more on things that were “material” and “measurable.”

So in the History of Political Theories volume you see Merriam and people in his orbit making that criticism of the field, and also explicitly invoking and embracing Franz Boas’s critique of racial evolutionism. But what blew me away when I first encountered the book is that, for Merriam and for this group, as one of the people in that volume put it, the cure for “race dogmatism” was not antiracism, as it would be for the Boasians—it was “an ounce of eugenics.”

And when I explored this contradiction, or this seeming contradiction, what I found was that during this period, Merriam and others spent a lot of time cultivating connections with eugenics researchers and really most of the leading lights of scientific racism in the 1920s. Merriam in particular was taken with the idea that you could document and measure politically relevant differences by these seemingly objective, technical means. Also very appealing was the idea of an account of difference that wasn’t monolithic or categorical. It preserved group difference, but it did so via individual difference. Groups were a matter of proportions and averages—things you could measure, map, and compare in quantitative terms—rather than collective souls or essences.

So what seems like an argument against racism and the use of race as a basic political category becomes an argument for a different flavor of racism. And what I argue eventually is that in this process of reimagining the relationship between race and political life, political scientists begin to produce a new image of political life that remains with us in important ways.

AS: Today we are seeing a revival of some of the same kind of racist ideas that you talk about in your book: racist pseudo-science about genetically disparate capabilities for self-government, fears of immigrants and a “white genocide,” the promotion of mythic narratives about the superiority of “Western” or “Judeo-Christian” civilization. (In the time period you talking about, that last category was more tightly drawn as “Teutonic” or “Anglo-Saxon.”) Many of the people peddling these ideas, though, see the academy as their enemy—rather than, as in the history you tell, the factory manufacturing and distributing many of those ideas. Could you comment a bit on how you see the academy—particularly social science—and its relationship to the production or revival of racist ideas today?

JB: It hadn’t been long since I’d written a chapter on progressive-era political scientists’ call for “realism” with regard to race (Woodrow Wilson was one of the people taking this position) when in the run-up to the 2016 election you started to hear about people like Richard Spencer, Stephen Bannon, and Stephen Miller talking about “race realism” and meaning essentially the same thing. Those ideas had never entirely gone away but they had been marginalized to an important extent, and then there they were, openly connected to the Trump campaign and presidency. So suddenly things that were mainstream in the pre-Civil Rights era were on the lips of people in and near the White House in this very open way. And I don’t see them being beaten back the way they should be. You are also right that there is a powerful anti-intellectualism connected to that movement.

But yes, I wish that the academy would take its role as the enemy a bit more seriously. I mean to an extent we still do let people manufacture and distribute racist and sexist nonsense from university positions—I’m thinking about people like Jordan Peterson and also anyone insisting we have to tolerate him and people like him in the name of ideological diversity. And we just need to stop that. Nobody’s suggesting we need flat-earthers in geology departments. Or at least I hope not.

But I’m also struck by what seems to me a vogue or at least an openness to other things that also look disturbingly familiar to me from writing the book. Something I touch on briefly in the book is “genes and politics” research—work that “finds” genetic bases for things like liberalism or conservatism. So we are back to this very old idea that the kind of body you have determines the kind of politics you have. The “genes and politics” people are careful to distance themselves from the racial implications of their work, but when you think about racialized voting patterns and gender gaps, etc., the slope gets pretty slippery.

And I can’t get into that here, but what I suggest in the book is that the appeal of that idea is partly the shiny, sciencey veneer—it was for Burgess as well, and the other political scientists I write about who invoked various iterations of race science, even though the science looks different in each case. But it’s also—and always has been, in tightly related ways—the way it allows us to sidestep or evade class or ideological conflict. We aren’t fighting over real things—we are just wired differently. And that prospect is very appealing to a certain kind of liberalism—the presidential candidate Andrew Yang recently tweeted about how democrats need to “build bridges” because some part of the population will always be genetically predisposed to conservatism. But the “conservative gene” is no less ideological than the “Teutonic germ of Anglo-Saxon liberty” was, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to pretend that the rise of the far-right is some kind of natural phenomenon to be managed, rather than a political crisis to be fought on those terms.

A related phenomenon that I am becoming more interested in and worried about is what the political scientist Joanna Wuest has referred to as a kind of eruption of “bioessentialisms.” There is a lot of work on things like the effects of trauma on the brain, for example. And I don’t doubt that trauma has all sorts of physical effects. But I get worried about what happens when liberals try to mobilize this work politically to argue for services, or welfare state expansion of various kinds to remedy or prevent harms. Because while I am absolutely committed to those political demands, I think we need to be very, very careful about making claims for example that people who have been subject to trauma—or for example kids who have grown up amidst the stresses of poverty—belong to some kind of biologically distinct class.