Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro

3. The Rhetoric of Racist Antiradicalism

122 3 The Rhetoric of Racist Antiradicalism Do we desire a mongrel population in America such as that which gave birth to Sovietism in Russia? —Clinton Stoddard Burr, America’s Race Heritage (1922) Thus far the derivation of the New Negro movement in the political radicalism of the wartime and immediate postwar years and various contradictions internal to the theory and practice of the Left that would contribute to the supersession of class struggle by culturalism have been analyzed. In future chapters of Spectres of 1919, the attempts by radicals and progressives to fashion counterdiscourses to the rhetoric of 100 percent Americanism are examined and linked to Alain Locke’s culturalist manifesto in The New Negro. At this point, however, the nature and extent of the ruling-class ideological offensive in the wake of the class struggles of 1919 must be taken into account. Even if contradictions internal to the Left set the limits of its ability to contest the dominant discourse and made it vulnerable to the culturalist offensive, the overwhelming force of the assault, both material and discursive, that occurred during the postwar Thermidor must be not be underestimated. External constraints , after all, shape the conditions of possibility under which internal contradictions can work themselves out. While intellectual historians and historians of science have long acknowledged the links between racism and antiradicalism, I hope to contribute to the discussion of this issue in two ways. First, I trace the connections between, on the one hand, existing discourses associating biol- The Rhetoric of Racist Antiradicalism 123 ogy with political radicalism—discourses that, before the war, were directed primarily against Europeans of non-”Nordic” descent—and, on the other hand, the emerging concern among ruling elites about so-called disgruntled agitators among the nation’s mulatto population. Although the post-1920 reclassification that obliterated the category of mulatto from the U.S. census was in some respects the logical consequence of several decades of Jim Crow, it cannot be isolated from the fears aroused among ruling elites by the revolutionary upsurge of 1919. Second, I analyze the central role played in reactionary rhetoric by a heavily racialized organic trope linking soil with nation, root with its past, fruit-bearing tree with its present, and seed with its future. This trope would be central in the rhetoric of cultural pluralism, which occupied a parasitic—or at least dependent—relation to the discourse of the nativists and eugenicists. Third, I consider the achievements and limitations of the opposition to racist antiradicalism offered by the emerging school of cultural anthropology associated with Franz Boas, whose work, it is widely acknowledged , would eventually drive the racists from the field and provide indispensable scientific and methodological grounding to the program of the Harlem Renaissance. Whereas critical discussions of the Boasian project routinely focus on the cultural anthropologists’ inability fully to break with the dominant discourse regarding race, I stress the extent to which the Boasians were constrained by the limitations of contemporaneous socialist politics, with which they were, individually and as a group, openly sympathetic. “Democracy Has No More Virtue Than Mumbo-Jumbo or a West African Ju-Ju”: Nativism and Eugenics in the Era of 1919 The discourse of racist antiradicalism that reached flood level in the wake of 1919 had its origins in a long history of pseudoscience invoking “nature” in defense of social inequality. As early as the 1830s, biological doctrines bearing scientific-sounding names—for example, ethnology and craniology—had been trotted out to rationalize slavery. In the wake of the European revolutions of 1848, the French count Arthur de Gobineau, whose theories vaulted the ocean with little difficulty, decried the excesses of democracy, celebrated the achievements of the “Teutonic race”—which alone among the races, he opined, was motivated by “honor”—and proposed a categorization of human types, with Africans at the very bottom. Although “the intellect [of the negroid variety of humanity] will always move within a very narrow circle,” he cautioned, “he often has an intensity of desire, and so of will, which may be called terrible.” Francis Gal- 124 Spectres of 1919 ton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, launched the eugenics movement, calling for “race improvement” on both the individual and group level. He targeted as inferior to Britons not only Negroes—whose “average intellectual standard . . . is some two grades below our own”—but also the French, among whose “abler races . . . the...