The unity and identity of structure in an organism, in which a law of action may be inferred, form the condition of positive science.”80
For Burgess, race (that is, “relations of birth and race-kinship”) was the basis of the “unity and identity of structure” in the “organism” that was the state. Social contracts and natural rights belonged to the realm of philosophy. “History and ethnology” offered “elevated ground,” a “standpoint” from which to make valid political judgments.81 For example, as we have seen, Burgess located both the source and limit of popular sovereignty in the state. The basis for this apparent anomaly Burgess found on precisely that “elevated ground.”
From this vantage point, it appeared clear to Burgess that it would not be safe for “the popular or democratic form” to “exert its greatest influence” until America had “perfected its nationality.” That is, a truly “national” state would “permit … the participation of the governed in the government” because in a Teutonic state the population would support only “the enactment and administration of laws … whose effect will be the realization of the truest liberty.”82 However, in the late nineteenth century, “the ethnic character” of the American population was “very cosmopolitan …, conglomerated, so to speak, with other elements, numerically quite strong,” such as “Celts,” “Mongols,” and “negroes.” To make matters worse, the United States was fairly “prodigal” with suffrage.83 Therefore, it remained necessary to limit legislative power and other instruments of popular control in favor of a strong federal judiciary.
Burgess worried that even in the heyday of his theory, its implications were never sufficiently appreciated by many readers. He lamented in his memoir that his work was misunderstood as “the ‘Leviathan’ of modern political science,” and that his critics never recognized that the state as it developed would limit government, not glorify it.84 Indeed, Burgess exhibited a clear antipathy to the emerging regulatory apparatus of government, which he saw as an unwarranted intrusion of mass whims on the sphere of liberty guaranteed by the state.85
This, too, was racialized, in that Burgess viewed those demanding economic regulation as “foreign” or corrupted by “foreign elements” and therefore as outside that protected sphere of liberty. In an 1895 essay titled “The Ideal of the American Commonwealth,” Burgess characterized America as “already based upon ideal principles” and as having “advanced many stages in an ideal development.” For this reason, he wrote, “we are compelled” to view people favoring a “revolution” of that system “as the enemies in principle of the American republic and of the political civilization of the world.”86
Three sources threatened such revolution: sectionalism, “pollution” by “non-Aryan elements,” and “so-called socialistic movements.” Sectionalism, while largely defeated in the Civil War, had demonstrated its terrible power in that conflict and still threatened in the form of Populism. For their part, the threats of non-Aryan pollution and socialism were linked by the fact that “looking to government” was a (Southern- and Eastern-) “European habit.” The strength of socialism in the United States, then, was owed to “the immense immigration into our population of that very element of Europe’s population to which such propositions appeal.”87
These threats led Burgess, despite his suspicion of regulatory measures and zeal for liberty, to embrace a draconian interpretation of government’s police powers in some cases.88 The element that threatened American liberty by importing socialistic ideas also constituted a threat by its very nature—the disorder to which those non-Aryan European populations were prone might be a justification for increased governmental capacity on a permanent basis. This meant that the “conclusions of practical politics” that followed from state theory included the “prime policy”—indeed, “duty”—of a modern constitutional government “to attain proper physical boundaries and to render its population ethnically homogeneous,” thereby following “the indications of nature and aid[ing] the ethnical impulse to conscious development.” Similarly, government could permissibly “insist … upon the use of a common language and upon the establishment of homogeneous institutions and laws.” This could include the use of force, which when put to such ends, was “not only justifiable … but morally obligatory.” Government might, for example, “righteously deport” any “ethnically hostile population,” and ought to secure borders against “deleterious” foreign influences.89 Identifying “disorderly” with racialized groups allowed Burgess to embrace both liberty (for the uncorrupted Teutons) and authoritarianism (for everyone else).
One of Burgess’s prize pupils, Richmond Mayo-Smith, took a similar position in his extensive work on immigration. This is perhaps even more striking in Mayo-Smith’s case. While no radical, Mayo-Smith took far more moderate and labor-friendly political stances than his mentor. So his views are harder to dismiss as a pure rationalization of reactionary ideology.
A statistician and political economist, Mayo-Smith was among the founders of the American Economic Association (AEA). Richard T. Ely had founded the AEA in 1885 in order to create a home for institutionalist economics, an alternative to neoclassical theory that was friendlier to stateled reform efforts. As Ely put it in an early mission statement for the group, the neoclassical principle of laissez-faire was “unsafe in politics and unsound in morals.”90 Mayo-Smith was a moderate figure—in fact Ely recruited him, along with E. R. A. Seligman, another moderately reformist Columbia-affiliated economist, in part to soften any image of the AEA as a home for left politics. Still, Mayo-Smith viewed the question of government regulation as a matter of expediency more than principle, seeking to develop statistical methods that could evaluate policy initiatives on a case-by-case basis. He also evinced considerably more solicitude for the working classes than Burgess did, developing close ties to labor and to the settlement house movement.91 Nonetheless, this solicitude only applied to racially acceptable members of the working class, and especially to those who were already present on U.S. soil.
Mayo-Smith deployed the framework of state theory against the claim that universal, natural rights claims might be relevant to immigration policy. Like Burgess, he cast the very notion of such rights as a misunderstanding, born of a narrowness of vision that mistakes the present state of things for eternal truth. In his view, rights and liberties were “merely historical,” a grant conferred by a state that “may also withdraw it.” And even if such rights had developed, they would be trumped by America’s “duty to humanity” to exclude “the depraved dregs of European civilization” and thereby to see to it “that civilization progresses.”92
Indeed, America’s immigrant past could only properly be understood within this framework of progress. In its earlier, lower state of civilization, America needed foreign population to claim the continent’s vast resources. The harshness of the early period of settlement mitigated the danger of welcoming that labor since the difficult conditions of the early years fortunately “kill[ed] off a large number of those consigned” to them. Even so, as a nation progressed, Mayo-Smith argued, it lost its “capacity of absorbing the lower elements of other civilizations,” and America was “getting to the limit set by nature” for the “work” of offering “opportunity to the poor and degraded of Europe.” This did not represent a loss, however, because humanity’s interest did not lie in the fate of its degraded members but rather in that of its elite: the “duty of every nation” was “to see to it that the higher civilization triumphs over the lower” by “preserving its own civilization against the disintegrating forces of barbarism.”93
A similar logic explains why Burgess, who pronounced fulsomely on the duties of the Teutonic nations to have “a colonial policy,” opposed expansion of American empire overseas when that became a practical possibility.94 Burgess described the Spanish-American War and subsequent annexation of the Philippines as “the first great shock” of his professional career and, along with his colleagues, devoted many pages of the
