The Turn-of-the-Century Concept of Race

At a meeting of the American Antiquarian Society in 1895, after hearing a paper on “The Scotch-Irish in America,” G. Stanley Hall, president of Clark University and one of the country’s leading psychologists, remarked that he did not know of “a better illustration of the beneficial effects of crossing different stocks than this.” Hall was not generally in favor of race mixture, but he was willing to make an exception in this case, because the brain fibers of the Scotch and Irish fitted so neatly into each other’s cranial interstices.

The Irish race anthropologically regarded is, as a stock, remarkable for its vitality, for its esprit, for its ready wit, for its quick susceptibility to all relations with all things and all men around it. On the other hand, the Scotch mature later, and from the stand-point of brain analysis they must be as remarkable for the fibers that connect the parts of the cortex one with the other, the so called ‘association fibers,’ as the Irish brain must be for the ‘projective fibers’ connecting with the external world. [The product of their] “favorable commingling of bloods is seen in the Scotch-Irish race;...they are not only more susceptible to all environments outside, but their activity is prolonged to a greater period of age.

Hall made it clear that much more was involved in the “commingling of bloods” than simply physical characteristics. “The combination of racial bloods is not a mere matter of biology or physiology...because physical inheritance does not include mere physical mingling of the bloods, but [also] that subtle atmosphere of associations, of home traditions, of family recol-lections and ideals and aims, that are so inseparable.”

From the American Antiquarian Society meetings in Boston to the chambers of the United States Senate is a step out into the wider American society of the 1890s. But where the speaker is Henry Cabot Lodge, the transition is an easy one, and indeed the pattern of assumption is not dissimilar. Speaking in favor of immigration restriction in 1896, Lodge argued that though a Hindoo might “absorb the learning of Oxford” and even sit in Parliament, he could not be made an Englishman, even though they both came from the “great Indo-European family.” It had taken “six thousand years and more to create the differences which exist between them,” and these could not be effaced by education in a single lifetime. Lodge went on to ask what was the “matter of race which separates the Englishman from the Hindoo and the American from the Indian?”

It is something deeper and more fundamental than anything which concerns the intellect. We all know it instinctively, although it is so impalpable we can scarcely define it, and yet it is so deeply marked that even the physiological differences between the Negro, the Mongol, and the Caucasian are not more persistent or more obvious. When we speak of a race, then,...we mean the moral and intellectual characters, which in their association make the soul of a race, and which represent the product of all its past, the inheritance of all its ancestors, and the motives of all its conduct. The men of each race possess an indestructible stock of ideas, traditions, sentiments, modes of thought, an unconscious inheritance from their ancestors, upon which argument has no effect. What makes a race are their mental and, above all, their moral char-acteristics, the slow growth and accumulation of centuries of toil and conflict.

To move from scholar to scholar-politician to fictional Irish saloon-keeper is hardly to encompass all levels of late nineteenth-century American society, but for present purposes we will go no further than to note that similar assumptions seem to underlie the thinking of Mr. Dooley. Mr. Dooley felt that the trouble with the Cubans was that they didn’t “undherstand our civilization.” To us, freedom meant hard work; to the Cuban, it meant blissful idleness. “Ye can’t make people here undherstand that, an’ ye can’t make a Cubian undherstand that freedom means...