John W. Burgess, the racial state and the making of the American science of politics

Abstract

This article examines the place of racial ideas in the constitution of political science as an academic discipline in the USA. For the Gilded Age generation that built the first PhD-granting departments in political science in the country, ‘race’ was the source of sovereignty, the basis of democratic legitimacy and a tool for delineating democracy's borders. It was also an important element of that cohort's aspiration to a ‘science’ of politics, distinct from what they viewed as the ‘abstract and formal’ theorizing of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Moreover, while the brand of racialism that characterized this founding moment came to seem outmoded within a few decades, in the 1920s political scientists seeking once again to claim an empirical, scientific basis for their discipline – and for American democracy – turned to new accounts and sciences of race.

Keywords:

• John W. Burgess
• Charles E. Merriam
• racial thought
• political science
• history of the social sciences
• political theory

Acknowledgements

This article was improved by comments from an anonymous reviewer for this publication, Lauren Brown, Kent Worcester, Andreas Hernandez, Wilbur Rich, Sean Jacobs, Liza Featherstone, Caitlin Zaloom and from fellow panellists and audience members at the APSA meetings. Helpful comments on earlier and different versions of this argument came from Adolph Reed, Jr, David Plotke, Robert Vitalis and Alice O'Connor, among many others. Errors are my own.

Notes

1. Disciplinary history has been slow to develop in political science, but over the last three decades accounts of the discipline's development have appeared with increasing regularity, and enough sophisticated literature now exists that we might claim that it represents a sort of mini-subfield, led by figures like John Gunnell and James Farr. Race has not figured prominently in this discussion, with two exceptions. The first is a body of commentary, most of it by African-American political scientists, interrogating the marginalization in the discipline of black politics research, analysis of racial oppression more broadly, and of work exhibiting an impulse towards racial reform (e.g. Matthews 1969; Jones and Willingham 1970; Holden 1983; Walton 1985; Wilson 1985; McClain and Garcia 1993; Walton and McCormick 1997; Smith 2004; Rich ed., 2007; Alexander-Ford 2012). The second is a growing body of work examining how racial thought infused international relations scholars’ conceptions of US relations to the rest of the world, and particularly how it helped legitimate American imperialism (Ng 1994; Schmidt 1998; Vitalis 2002; Schmidt and Long 2003; Vitalis 2003; Blatt 2004; Henderson in Rich, ed., 2007; Schmidt 2008; Vitalis 2008). I owe a particular debt to Vitalis, whose work first pointed me to the racialism of early political science.

2. Burgess did not use the language of a ‘general will’ as opposed to the ‘particular will’ expressed in manifestations of popular politics, but his near contemporary W. W. Willoughby did so in much the same context (Rodgers 1987, p. 160).

3. Crick (1959) also portrays Burgess as a figure whose Hegelianism fit uneasily with his deep distrust of government.

4. Political Science Quarterly (est. 1886), the Proceedings of the American Political Science Association (est. 1903) and the American Political Science Review (est. 1906). I did not include the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences (AAPSS; est. 1890) because of its looser connection to political science as a discipline; in fact the AAAPSS explicitly resisted the sort of disciplinary specialization and vocational distinctions (above all between the theorist and the reformer) that figures like Burgess and Adams were pursuing. If I had included it, I would have found greater sympathy for Reconstruction, not least in the writings of contributor W. E. B. Du Bois.

5. This is particularly notable given the extent to which Burgess's work had been eclipsed during the early 1900s. Much of the high-profile research in this period had been focused on descriptions of administrative and institutional arrangements – indeed Gunnell (2004, p. 9) has characterized this period as a ‘theoretical hiatus’. It suggests that while they no longer accepted Burgess's synthesis, Merriam and his collaborators followed him in identifying ‘race’ as a site where deeper, more scientific insights about political life could be found, and therefore found it necessary to think their way out of his framework in order to elaborate their own.

6. Indeed, in a 1923 letter to Merriam, Walter Lippmann used very similar language to Burgess's, expressing a hope that psychologists, particularly those engaged in the study of mental measurement, and natural scientists, might soon ‘supply us [political scientists] with our premises’ (17 February, Charles E. Merriam Papers, University of Chicago Library, Department of Special Collections, Chicago, IL, Series 2, Subseries 3, Box 34, Folder 12).

7. Harvard's William Yandell Elliot (1925) made this point repeatedly, as when he complained in his otherwise positive review of Merriam and Barnes's volume that the authors threatened to dissolve political science into sociology.

8. Minutes of the Meeting of the Sociological Conference Group, Committee on Scientific Problems of Human Migration, Offices of the National Research Council, 29 March 1923. Mary Van Kleeck Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA, Box 84, Folder 9, p. 23.

9. The lion's share of the Committee's funding came from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Fund.

10. Proceedings, Conference on Human Migration, arranged by the Committee on Scientific Problems of Immigration, Division of Anthropology and Psychology, NRC, Washington DC, 18 November 1922. Robert M. Yerkes Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven, CT, Series 2, Box 73, Folder 1398, p. 2.

11. On Merriam's attempts to find mental tests that could be of use to political science see, for example, correspondence with Yerkes as well as Harold Bingham and L. L. Thurstone in Charles E. Merriam Papers, Series 2, Subseries 3. Box 43, Folder 16 contains correspondence with Yerkes in this regard; Box 26, Folder 2 contains correspondence with Bingham; correspondence with Thurstone is in Box 41, Folder 11.

12. For a fuller version of this story, see Blatt 2010.

13. It was also attractive to the institution builders of the 1920s because of the prestige and funding that the natural sciences commanded.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jessica Blatt

JESSICA BLATT is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Marymount Manhattan College.