Race, competition, and institutional change in J.R. Commons

Abstract

This article examines the contribution of J.R. Commons to race relations, competition, and institutional change. One result of our study is that, in his analysis of institutional dynamics in the United States, Commons’ rejection of laissez-faire is derived from a racist analytical framework: the “superior races” should be protected from the “inferior races”. Another result is that Commons adopts a neo-Lamarckian framework which takes education as the basis for the assimilation of “inferior races”. This article then shows that policies often defended as progressives, as education policies, may be derived from racist foundations. The final remarks single out the ambiguous connection between race and culture revealed by Commons’ approach.

Keywords:

• Commons
• racism
• culture
• institutions
• selection

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the editors and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

¹ One notable exception is Ramstad and Starkey (1995).

² Allen Roger (1972) argues that, even if Darwin did not consider the human or society in his writings, his correspondence reveals that he accepted the conception of the Social Darwinists.

³ The term “Progressives”, which does not refer to an ideologically monolithic group, gathers liberal social reformers and moderate socialists (Freeden 1979, fn. 2, p. 645).

⁴ “If less than two per cent of the births are below the normal Aryan brain level, on the other hand, possibly two per cent are above the average, and should be classed as the geniuses who could achieve eminence regardless of surroundings. The remaining ninety per cent or more are born with ordinary equipment; they are hereditarily neither good nor bad, criminal nor virtuous, brilliant nor stupid. With these masses of the people, the first fifteen years of infancy and youth are decisive.” (Commons 1897, p. 93)

⁵ “Direct selection is highly artificial, but it is only negative. It consists in segregating the degenerates to prevent propagation. Society cannot, of course, directly interfere with the marriage choice of normal persons, for that would be to choke the purest expression of personality. But it can isolate the two per cent who will never rise to moral responsibility. This would doubtless increase the wards of the state, but it is needed both for the reason already given and, more especially, to clarify the public mind on the causes of delinquency and dependency. As long as these evils can be charged to heredity the public is blinded to the share that springs for social injustice.” (Commons 1897, p. 94)

⁶ “But even so, Darwin distinguished between ‘natural selection’ and ‘artificial selection’. Artificial selection bears to Natural selection the relation that Machine bears to Mechanism. It is “artificial” simply because it is Purpose, Futurity, Planning, injected into and greatly controlling the struggle for life. Darwin admitted that his term “natural selection” was a misnomer, and regretted his resort to metaphor.” (Commons 1934a, vol. 1, p. 636)

⁷ “This analogy between the evolution of species and the evolution of customs, both by artificial selection, is close enough to warrant the assertion that there is a similar force at work which we name Willingness, both conscious and habitual.” (Commons 1934a, vol. 1, p. 45)

⁸ The Social Gospel movement represented a “minority of American Protestantism between 1865 and 1915, reacting against excessive liberalism, concerned with ethics, and including the idea of evolution and a vision of society as an organism that affects individuals.” (Gonce 1996, p. 642)

⁹ “To the west of the Slavs we find the Teutonic branches of the Aryans, the Germans, the Scandinavians, and, above all, the English and Scot-Irish with their descent from the Angles, Saxons, and Franks, who have given to America our largest accessions in numbers, besides our languages, our institutions, and forms of government. Then other branches of the Aryans known as Celtic, including the Irish, Scotch, and Welsh, formerly driven into the hills and islands by the Teutons, have in these latter days vied with the English and Germans in adding to our population. The French, a mixture of Teuton and Celt, a nationality noted above all others for its stationarity population and dislike of migration, are nevertheless contributing to our numbers by the circuitous route of Canada, and are sending to us a class of people more different from the present-day Frenchman in his native home than the Italian or Portuguese is different from the Frenchman.” (Commons 1907, pp. 14–15)

¹⁰ “Formerly cannibalism prevailed, but it has now been largely stamped out by European governments. The native governments are tribal, and the chiefs sustain themselves by their physical prowess and the help of priests and medicine men. Property is mainly in women and slaves, and inheritance is through the female, except among the nobility of Dahomey, where primogenitures rules. Written laws and record are unknown. The people are unstable, indifferent to suffering, and ‘easily aroused to ferocity by the sight of blood or under great fear’. They exhibit aversion to silence and solitude, love of rhythm, excitability, and lack of reserve. All travellers speak of their impulsiveness, strong sexual passion, and lack of will power. Such, in brief, were the land and the people that furnished one-sixth of our total population and two-fifths of our Southern population.” (Commons 1907, p. 40)

¹¹ “How different from the qualities of the typical American citizen whose forefathers have erected our edifice of representative democracy! It was not the peasant class of Europe that sought these shores in order to found a free government. It was the middle class, the merchants and yeomen, those who in religion and politics were literally ‘protestants,’ and who possessed the intelligence, manliness, and public spirit which urged them to assert for themselves those inalienable rights which the church or the state of their time had arrogated to itself. With such a social class, democracy is the only acceptable form of government. They demand and secure equal opportunities because they are able to rise to those opportunities. By their own inherent nature, they look forward to and aspire to the highest positions.” (Commons 1907, pp. 10–1)

¹² “The problem now is a social one – how to unite into one people a congeries of races even more diverse than the resources and climates from which they draw their subsistence. That motto, ‘E pluribus unum,’ which in the past has guided those who through constitutional debate and civil war worked out our form of government, must now again be the motto of those who would work out the more fundamental problem of divergent races. Here is something deeper than the form of government – it is the essence of government – for it is that union of the hearts and lives and abilities of the people which makes government what it really is.” (Commons 1907, pp. 5–6)

¹³ The aim of the Chinese Exclusion Act was to put an end to Chinese immigration and to prohibit Chinese from becoming US citizens.

¹⁴ “Just as in the many thousand years of man's domestication of animals, the breechy cow and the balky horse have been almost eliminated by artificial selection, so slavery tended to transform the savage by eliminating those who were self-willed, ambitious, and possessed of individual initiative. Other races of immigrants, by contact with our institutions, have been civilized – the Negro has been only domesticated. Democratic civilization offers an outlet for those who are morally and intellectually vigorous enough to break away from the stolid mass of their fellows; domestication dreads and suppresses them as dangerous rebels. The very qualities of intelligence and manliness which are essential for citizenship in a democracy were systematically expunged from the negro race through two hundred years of slavery.” (Commons 1907, pp. 40–1)

¹⁵ “The ambitious races are the industrial races. But their ambition and their industry bring the momentous problem of destructive competition. It might seem that this evil would correct itself – that an increase in the products of one industry would be offset by an increase in other industries; that, therefore, the increased supply in one would not be forced upon the market at lower prices, but would be exchanged on the same terms as before the increased supply in others. This is indeed the case in prosperous times. All industries advance together, and the increased supply of one is merely and increasing demand for others. But for some reason, industries do not always harmoniously advance together. And when the disproportion appears, the workers who are blindly but ambitiously pushing ahead endeavour to overcome, by increasing the quantity of output, what they lose by reducing the price. There is but one immediate and practical remedy – the organization of labor to regulate competition.” (Commons 1907, pp. 148–9)

¹⁶ “The term amalgamation may be used for that mixture of blood which unites races in a common stock, while assimilation is that union of their minds and wills which enables them to think and act together. Amalgamation is a process of centuries, but assimilation is a process of individual training. Amalgamation is a blending of races, assimilation is a blending of civilizations. Amalgamation is beyond the organized efforts of government, but assimilation can be promoted by social institutions and laws. Amalgamation therefore cannot attract our practical interest, except as its presence or absence sets limits to our efforts toward assimilation.” (Commons 1907, p. 209)

¹⁷ “To be great a nation need not be of one blood, it must be of one mind. Racial inequality and inferiority are fundamental only to the extent that they prevent mental and moral assimilation. If we think together, we can act together, and the organ of common thought and action is common language.” (Commons 1907, p. 20)

¹⁸ It seems that Commons knew the works of B.T. Washington (1899, 1901) and W.E.B. DuBois on the issue of the “black race”. Indeed, in the beginning of the 1907 volume – in the part dedicated to the references cited in footnotes, Commons quotes several of W.E.B. Dubois’ contributions, notably The Philadelphia Negro and The Souls of Black Folk. In this part of the book, Commons (1907) also quotes two contributions by B.T. Washington: The Future of the American Negro and Up From Slavery. But this influence can be mainly grasped in the text dedicated to “The Negro” in the October issue of the Chautauquan (1903/1904). In this article, Commons (1903 p. 234) speaks of Booker T. Washington as “the Negro founder and famous head of Tuskegee Institute which places emphasis on industrial training and property acquisition, as a preparation for suffrage”. Concerning W.E.B. DuBois (1899, 1903), Commons (1903, p. 234) refers to him as “the eminent Negro professor at Atlanta University, who, while acknowledging the good work of schools like Tuskegee, contends strongly for the higher education and political rights of the Negroes”.

¹⁹ “This hostility is not primarily racial in character. It is the competitive struggle for standards of living. It appears to be racial because for the most part races have different standards. But where different races agree on their standards the racial struggle ceases, and the negro, Italian, Slav, and American join together in the class struggle of a trade-union. On the other hand, if the same race has different standards, the economic struggle breaks down even the strongest affinities of race.” (Commons 1907, p. 115)

²⁰ “The Teutonic races, until five hundred years after Christ, were primitive in their civilization, yet they had the mental capacities which made them, like Arminius, able to comprehend and absorb the highest Roman civilization. They passed through the medieval period and then came out into the modern period of advanced civilization, yet during these two thousands years, their mental capacities, the original endowment of race, have scarcely improved. It is civilization, not race evolution, that has transformed the primitive warrior into the philosopher, scientist, and business man. Could their babies have been taken from the woods two thousands years ago and transported to the homes and schools of modern America, they could have covered in one generation the progress of twenty centuries.” (Commons 1917a, p. 109)

²¹ “The children of all the races of the temperate zones are eligible to the highest American civilization, and it only needs that they be ‘caught’ young enough. This cannot be said for the children of the tropical zone. Amalgamation is their door to assimilation. Frederick Douglass, Booker Washington, Professor DuBois are an honor to any race, but they are mulattoes.” (Commons 1917a, p. 110)