Loyal Subjects: Bonds of Nation, Race, and Allegiance in Nineteenth-Century America

Chapter 5: Philosophies of Loyalty

5 / Philosophies of Loyalty In 1905, Josiah Royce, professor of philosophy at Harvard University, urged members of the Chicago and the New York Ethical societies to reflect on a perennial and intractable social problem—the problem of race. “Is it a ‘yellow peril,’ a ‘black peril,’ or perhaps, after all, is it rather some form of a ‘white peril,’” he challengingly asked, “which most threatens the future of humanity in this day of great struggles and of complex issues ?”1 Royce was certainly not alone in considering the question of race and its role in American life at the beginning of the twentieth century; in addition to the countless plantation stories, pamphlets, and newspaper articles, academics from a variety of disciplines—including ethnology, sociology, and anthropology—also focused their research on the insistent issue of race relations. In 1908, for instance, Franz Boas spoke to the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Baltimore on the subject of “Race Problems in America.” As had Royce before him, Boas admitted that his goal in choosing this subject was to confront the “grave issues [arising from] the presence of distinct types of man in our country.”2 Despite differing disciplines, presuppositions, and methodologies, both scholars endorsed the conclusion W. E. B. Du Bois announces in the early pages of The Souls of Black Folk (1903)—“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.”3 For Royce, however, racial prejudice was not only a sociological, political , cultural, or historical problem but also a philosophical one. If people are regularly rendered uncomfortable by superficial differences, Royce asked his auditors, how can we negotiate in a world where we are 180 / philosophies of loyalty increasingly thrown up against strangers? How are we to deal with “men who seem to us somehow very widely different from ourselves, in physical constitution, in temperament, in all their deeper nature, so that we are tempted to think of them as natural strangers to our souls, while nevertheless we find that they are stubbornly there in our world, and that they are men as much determined to live as we are, and are men who, in turn, find us as incomprehensible as we find them?” (5). In other words, how can we manage both our experience and our ideals to avoid finding others “incomprehensible”? What measures can guarantee that we approach people who seem naturally to be strange “fairly and humanely” (6)? If ethics helps us to understand relations between people, can it assist us in negotiating with difference that seems “incomprehensible”? For Royce, the answer to these complex questions is clear: we must learn to see beyond the body and the tropological manipulation it appears both to authorize and require. In opposition to thinkers like James Cutler, who notes in Lynch-Law (1905) that “abstractions still control where racial characteristics, circumstances, and conditions should be the determining factors,” Royce contends that only when we recognize the constructed nature of what appears to us to be natural—both in terms of “physical constitution” and “deeper nature”—can we begin to change responses that seem to be necessary and normal.4 Racial violence based on embodied prejudices can only be countered, Royce explains, by considering the assumptions underlying moral practices, particularly those that rigidly prioritize emotions over reason. Royce’s argument in “Race Questions and Prejudices” engages directly with the questions of bodies, figures, and emotions explored in the previous chapter, concluding that abstraction could assist in countering the reality of persistent and violent racial hate. Josiah Royce no longer enjoys widespread recognition and is usually remembered for whom he knew—T. S. Eliot, George Santayana, and William James—rather than for what he thought.5 Scholars emphasize his prolonged philosophical exchange with William James or his attempts to adapt idealism to American traditions of thought; his popular philosophy, such as the lecture delivered to the Ethical societies, is routinely disregarded as uninteresting or trivia1.6 Complaining that his social interventions are deficient—“There [is] no analysis of the roots of concrete social problems, no examination of the distribution of power that determine[s] the structure of the economy, no concern with the patterns of the interest represented by politics, and no grasp of the American political economy”—Bruce Kuklick concludes that “Royce appears philosophies of loyalty / 181 to have derived his knowledge [of social issues] from what he picked up in...