I was somewhat shocked to come across an American publication called the Journal of Race Development, published from 1910 to 1919.[1] I was especially surprised that a journal with such a name was a predecessor to Foreign Affairs, the respected journal of the Council of Foreign Relations. As I noted before, Foreign Affairs does not acknowledge this on its website.[2]
My post is about this Journal of Race Development. Here’s what I’ve learned.
First, the journal started publication soon after the United States began experimenting with colonialism. Having “freed” Cuba and the Philippines from the Spaniards in 1898, Americans kept the countries for themselves, more or less, along with islands such as Puerto Rico and Guam. The nation’s new role may have generated the journal—Americans suddenly realized the rest of the world might be relevant.
As to the purpose of the journal, George Blakeslee wrote in its introductory essay, “[The Journal] seeks to discover, not how weaker races may best be exploited, but how they may best be helped by the stronger.“[3] In other words, the editors were not interested in controlling or governing the “people of a lower class” (that would be imperialism) but, instead, they hoped to bring them up to the level of other races, mostly white.
Yes, the journal’s language reeks of condescension, although in the old sense of the word (i.e., as Jane Austen used it), meaning sympathy evinced by people of a “higher class” toward people of a “lower class.”
Also, the term “race” had a different meaning then. It didn’t necessarily refer to the few major races into which the human species is said to be divided[4], but to regional groups. The words we would use are “ethnic populations.” There were many races, but the point of the journal was that most were inferior to the cultures stemming from northern Europe (and also inferior to the Japanese, “whose civilization,” Blakeslee wrote, “is on a substantial equality with that of the nations of the West“).[5]
The journal included articles about Pacific nations, Africa, Mexico, and Latin America, but also Bulgaria, Macedonia, the Ottoman Empire, and others. Some articles discussed the nation’s African-American population, but that was not a major focus of the journal.
The journal’s founding editors were George Blakeslee and G. Stanley Hall. Blakeslee was a professor of history and international relations at Clark University (Worcester, Mass.). Hall was the president of Clark University.
Hall was a prominent psychologist, the first president of the American Psychological Society and founder of the American Psychological Journal (among other journals). He was also a eugenicist. That is, he believed that the genetic makeup of populations could be improved over time. In fact, he developed the odd theory that “each individual’s life course recapitulated humanity’s evolution from ‘savagery’ to ‘civilization.’”[6] Some races had not reached “civilization”; they were either in childhood or adolescence.
Skimming through many articles, one finds some that are cringe-worthy, even bizarre. Charles E. Woodruff had an idea that over time migrations of the higher type of people brought up the lower classes. In “Some Laws of Racial and Intellectual Development,” he wrote:
At the present time almost every advance in culture is the conception of some man in the northwest corner of Europe, or one whose ancestors came from that place more or less recently. Even [Guglielmo] Marconi had an English mother and cannot be wholly claimed by the Mediterranean.[7]
Then there is the white man’s burden. Wrote J. Howard Stoutemeyer: “By retrieving these peoples from the tyranny of the primeval forests and fevers of Africa, the pythons and floods of the East Indies, and the famines and pestilences of India, western civilization has become the Prometheus to deliver them from the deepest dye of superstition.”[8]
Yet some of the articles are worth reading. The essay “Of the Culture of White Folk” by the celebrated African-American writer W.E. B. Dubois bluntly assesses Europe’s culture after it descended into the First World War. “This is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming terrible is the real soul of white culture—back of all culture, stripped and visible today.”[9] And:
“Behold little Belgium and her pitiable plight; but has the world forgotten Congo? What Belgium now suffers is not half, nor even a tenth of what she has done to Black Congo since Stanley’s great dream of 1880.”[10]
Frequently foreign writers, even those from “backward” countries, graced the journal’s pages. Yet sometimes they merely underscored the arguments of the “race developers.” Peruvian Federico A. Pezet wrote an eloquent essay comparing the histories of North and South Americans. But he did not flatter or even defend his “race.” After sharing a poignant history of his continent, he said to his North American audience, “You will better be able to understand his [the Latin American’s] idiosyncrasy and, in time, you will perhaps look upon him as a companion and a fellow worker in the great cause of human uplift.”[11]
Or consider John Howland, who was critical of racial prejudice, but who also was comfortable with stereotypes. “It is not, however, mere prejudice; for each race has its own peculiarities. The Saxon is phlegmatic, reflective, patient of delay, willing to wait for the slow processes of human experience. The Latin blood is fervid, and quickly boils at meeting opposition.”[12]
Yes, now we have a window on early twentieth-century views of race. To what extent do they still affect international affairs?
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[1] The journal is available online through the “JSTOR” (“Journal Storage”) digitized library at https://www.jstor.org/journal/jracedeve.
[2] See William Bundy, “The History of Foreign Affairs,” Foreign Affairs website, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/history-foreign-affairs.
[3] George H. Blakeslee, “Introduction,” Journal of Race Development 1, no. 1 (July 1910): 1-4., at 1.
[4] The idea of three major races is giving way to the view that the identification of race is at least in some respects a mental construction.
[5] Blakeslee, 1.
[6] “G. Stanley Hall,” Oxford Bibliographies. Oxford University Press.
[7] Charles E. Woodruff, “Some Laws of Racial and Intellectual Development,” Journal of Race Development 3, no. 2 (1912): 156-75, at 165.
[8] J. Howard Stoutemyer, “Race Education,” Journal of Race Development 5, no. 4 (1915): 438-66, at 442.
[9] W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, “Of the Culture of White Folk,” Journal of Race Development 7, no. 4 (1917): 434-447, at 437.
[10] Du Bois, 436.
[11] Federico A. Pezet, “Contrasts in the Development of Nationality in the Anglo- and Latin-American,” Journal of Race Development 5, no. 1 (1914): 1-18, at 18.
[12] John Howland, “Democracy on Trial.” Journal of Race Development 4, no. 3 (1914): 293-301, at 296.
“he believed that the genetic makeup of populations could be improved over time.” Putting aside any questions of belief in a genetically superior race, what he believed was possible then and much more possible now. We have the powers to genetically enhance human genetics. But even in 1900 it was certainly possible, if not desirable, that selective breeding in any group could improve certain abilities.
That would have then required a kind of tyranny that guided China’s one-child policy. That policy itself was largely an attempt to enhance the genetic stock–the communist dream of “the new man.” Instead of social engineering in the Lamarkian/Lysenko way, the Chinese chose the time proven agricultural method of having the “best” breed with the best. In their case the backward country people would be limited to one child, giving the more educated urbanized people a kind of parity since they tended to have fewer children anyway.
Today, with gene editing, we have started selecting children for desired traits. Simply by sequencing genes of parents and embryos, selection becomes possible. In China children have been born of gene edited embryos.
This “racial improvement” will inevitably advance with the science. Risks? Certainly. Will that stop the practice? No.
Kaufman’s first law of human enhancement: It is impossible to prohibit any enhancement of human powers.
Back check that law. I know of no exceptions.
Sadly, this scholarship will be used to support the notion of both white privilege and institutional racism and will become a plank in the lexicon of critical race theory. Sigh . . .
But, David, it also sheds light on the attitudes of the “real” Progressives, who have been given a free pass in all this protesting.