show history as at once “a record of the progress toward civilization of races originally barbarous” in accordance with their innate capacities and meaningfully shaped by contingency and “circumstance.”9
The State was meant for students, a “general clarification” of “systems of government and the main facts of institutional history” arrived at “through the use of a thorough comparative and historical method.”10 Not surprisingly, then, it presented the conventional wisdom in political science, inflected with newer currents in political scholarship, in particular the imperative to look past legal forms to the practices of political life. Likewise Bryce, a generation older, had begun to give a realistic slant to a traditional approach by disdaining the niceties of state theory while preserving much of its thrust, including the linkage of national character, race, and political institutions, as well as the suggestion of a collective political subject residing outside, and breathing life into, formal institutions.
However, while both men retained the idea that a collective consciousness shaped and animated government, in their work this collectivity was beginning to take a less specific form and to lose much of its particularly political character. Where race had once been the essence that political forms expressed, in their work and subsequently these things increasingly appeared in dynamic relationship to one another. Moreover, these authors, like many who would follow them, sought to shift the discipline’s focus away from the source of sovereignty and the justification of democracy and toward the day-to-day workings of institutions in an actually existing democratic polity. Crucially, this would include the practical “reality” of racial difference.
Reform and Racial Difference
At the turn of the twentieth century, U.S. political science lacked a central institutional home outside Columbia’s Academy of Political Science, which was dominated by students, faculty, and alumni from that university. However, the idea of an independent, national, professional organization gained traction as the PhDs trained there, at Johns Hopkins, and at even younger graduate programs (notably the University of Wisconsin and the University of Chicago) spread to teach courses in political science in colleges and universities nationwide.11 A series of planning sessions in 1902 culminated the following year at a meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) with the announcement of a new American Political Science Association.12 The political science group selected Columbia’s Frank Goodnow as its first president and held its first independently organized meeting in Chicago in 1904.
The original plan had been for a society of “comparative legislation,” but the APSA’s founders aspired to understand the “actual practices” of politics beyond what Wilson, borrowing a term from Walter Bagehot, had disparagingly called its “literary” (i.e., legal) forms.13 Accordingly, it was decided that the association would encompass the “entire field of political science.”14 After attending the first planning meeting in 1902, Burgess disappeared from any important role in the new association, which came to be spearheaded primarily by younger men representing a range of institutions, not exclusively academic.15
Exactly how Burgess was sidelined is murky. What is clear, however, is that the leadership of the new APSA wished to chart a new course. When Goodnow gave APSA’s first presidential address, he put his listeners on notice that from then forward the discipline would not “permit” the “political philosopher … to roam at will, subject to no check on the exuberancy of his fancy or caprice.” Rather, political scholarship would attend scrupulously to “the extra-legal customs and extra-legal organizations” that shape the “actual political system of a country.”16
This shift would leave the discipline less explicitly anchored to a theory of American democracy as Aryan Volksgeist and as a result would authorize a more experimental and pragmatic view of American institutions. Interpreting the development of the state and remaining true to its spirit had been Burgess’s central preoccupations. For many younger political scientists, “science” and “spirit” were antithetical terms. To qualify as the former, political scholarship had to offer a hardheaded appraisal of the facts, uncorrupted by preconceived philosophical frameworks, and point to real-world solutions to urgent problems of the day.
As we have seen, amid this increasing insistence on an inductive, empirical orientation to political life, “the state” did not disappear but began to shed some of its prescriptive force. Where once the term had been central to professional political analysis, signifying the soul of the race and the source of sovereignty, after the turn of the century the idea of a state standing behind and authorizing government increasingly came to signal the more prosaic notion that governing forms and practices reflected, and ought to be appropriate to, the character of a “people.”17 Less concerned with discerning the normative content of history, political scientists like Wilson and like-minded colleagues sought to describe and understand the functioning of American institutions and were open to the idea that those institutions might need fundamental alteration if they were to continue to serve American ideals.
Nonetheless, a racialized conception of “the people” persisted and helped to lend a conservative cast to political scientists’ reformism. For example, Wilson no less than Burgess held up Reconstruction as the prime example of a failure to grasp the basic facts of political life and of the ways in which the American system could fail to safeguard the people’s will. For many of Wilson’s contemporaries, too, Reconstruction served as a cautionary tale about both racial difference and the dangers of political action guided by principle rather than by a dispassionate, scientific estimation of political life as it was. To be scientific, political science would have to attend less to doctrine. Its task, rather, would be to discern how the practice of politics could accommodate not only new economic and social realities but also lasting “anthropological” truths.
Both this more pragmatic, experimental attitude and the sense that racial issues were of prime importance put political scientists firmly in the intellectual mainstream at the turn of the century. The Progressive Era in the United States and elsewhere was animated by an intense faith that scientific knowledge could solve social problems. And while progressivism had a left flank that engaged structural economic questions, among many American progressives, “social problems” often served as shorthand for the existence of people different from themselves and/or operating for whatever reason outside the bounds of familiar norms and hierarchies. Racial (and what were coming to be distinguished as “ethnic”) differences received special attention.18
Of course the term progressive is now applied to a broad range of tendencies, and many intellectuals and other elites at the turn of the century didn’t fit the label at all. However, as Rogers Smith puts it, the era nevertheless saw an “elite convergence” on certain ideals and a strong push for government to enact reforms guided by them. In Michael McGerr’s gloss, the progressive tendency centered on four “quintessential” ends: “to change other people; to end class conflict; to control big business; and to segregate society.” Similarly, Smith connects the various strains of progressivism through a common vision of a “modern democratically and scientifically guided nation that was also culturally ordered, unified, and civilized due to the predominance of northern European elements in its populace and customs.”19
It was in many ways a frightening period for the educated middle and upper classes. William McKinley’s victory over William Jennings Bryan in the 1896 presidential election ended the threat posed by Populism and the radical, farmer-worker alliance that had propelled it. But it did not resolve the issues underlying that insurgency and others like it: the rise of unprecedentedly massive corporations and consolidation of wealth at the top that seemed to threaten republican ideals; a breathtaking pace of urbanization and immigration that transformed the landscape and population; crippling, repeated economic depressions that fueled intense, often violent episodes of labor protest and repression.20 The cities seemed to be exploding, and at times they actually did—revolutionary anarchists and others
