regularly enough to make such attacks “a central preoccupation of American politics and culture.”21 The acquisition by the United States of overseas colonies likewise presented challenges to traditional notions of the country’s place in the world.
Nonetheless, it was also a time of wild, even utopian hopes among many elites. Where economic, ideological, and demographic changes threatened anarchy, progressives of various political stripes had great faith that scientific insight and the power of the state could be wielded in concert to produce a harmonious, well-ordered society. In The Promise of American Life, perhaps the paradigmatic statement of centrist progressivism, Herbert Croly argued that American prosperity, free political institutions, and the “worthier set of men” these would create offered “the highest hope for an excellent worldly life that mankind has yet ventured.”22 Unlike Burgess and Adams, who looked to the past to guide the present, progressives were predisposed to see modernity itself—big, efficient institutions, including government, corporations, and labor unions; expanded trade; and, for some, overseas territory—as American democracy’s best hope for deliverance from the scourges of economic depression, socialism, and general unrest. Fueled by support from industrialists interested in promoting scientific and technical progress, an explosion of professional societies, universities, and specialized journals promised new platforms for a newly self-conscious intellectual class eager to put its expertise at the service of this project.
In this context, many of the first homegrown PhDs in political science in the United States thought that the time was ripe to expand the purview of political scholarship and to make themselves useful to a government that had recently taken on new functions, including the management of an overseas empire. The rapid transformation of the American economy and society since the mid-nineteenth century had, they affirmed, delivered a world qualitatively different from that of the previous generation. The old formulas simply no longer applied.
Burgess’s political science sought to legitimate and proscribe, depending on the idea of “the state” to authorize American democracy while simultaneously marking its limits. The dominant tendency among the political scientists who would assume disciplinary leadership after Burgess, however, would be to see the workings of democracy as more pressing than its warrants. Goodnow, along with Wilson and others, consistently emphasized that things like democratic legitimacy and what Goodnow called “that elusive thing called sovereignty” had been problems for a post–Civil War age.23 “Efficiency” and “administration” were to be the watchwords of the new century, and the organization of the APSA was meant to put political science in step with the times.
To accomplish this, political scholarship would need to move away from the legalism and teleology of earlier years, and toward what appeared to be firmer scientific (that is, realistic, empirical, and inductive) footing. According to Shaw, twentieth-century political science would consist of “the orderly presentation of facts and the formulating of conclusions … of practical benefit to the perplexed legislator in time of his need.”24 As a result, things like the search for the Teutonic origins of liberty came to seem much less urgent, even quaint. Political scientists, Wilson urged, needed to focus on how to “run a constitution,” something that “was getting harder … than to frame one.”25
It is one thing to announce a new course for political knowledge and another to chart one, however. The frequency of calls for empiricism at APSA meetings over the years suggests that many continued to have misgivings about the discipline’s progress on that front. And not all observers were left with the impression that the APSA offered anything new or unusual. For example, when Political Science Quarterly reviewed the first issue of the Proceedings of the American Political Science Association, it affirmed that the “association’s field of activity” was to be the “study of the state,” with perhaps a novel emphasis on administrative law.26
Certainly around this time it became less common for every commentary on a given political event or institution to sweep through the centuries in search of origins and explanations. The valorization of inductivism and fact-gathering, moreover, meant that the writing in political science journals was drained of much of its drama. Page after page of the profession’s journals would be stuffed with matter-of-fact reports of legislative and judicial action, political developments, and administrative organization in the United States, Europe, and colonial possessions, often with little in the way of analysis and even less of the lofty pronouncements that Burgess had favored and that Goodnow would mock as “empyrean … speculation.”27
Nevertheless, these shifts masked significant continuities, particularly with regard to questions of racial difference and democratic unity. When Burgess was its leading light, political science had rested heavily on the tenets that races were organic and naturally separate units, that whites (and particularly “Teutons”) were superior, and that political interference with the natural racial order was doomed to fail. As we shall see, this did not change as his influence waned. Nor, even as political scientists sought to distance themselves from philosophical generalization, were grand pronouncements about the relative capacities and proper hierarchy of races subject to much in the way of empirical scrutiny. On the contrary, as they had in Burgess’s work, invocations of racial difference continued to serve almost as talismans anchoring propositions about political life to seemingly basic facts of nature.
Moreover, if there was a generational break in political science, it was one without an explicitly ideological edge. Despite the general recognition that both new modes of political analysis and governing would be required, most prominent political scientists of Wilson’s generation followed Burgess in viewing active government more as a danger than as the democratizing force some left progressives championed.28 During the Gilded Age, political economy and sociology attracted many young, reform-minded scholars steeped in “dissenting evangelical piety and social millennialism” and seeking new solutions to the “social question.” Their political commitments often put them sharply at odds with more conservative colleagues, resulting in hard-fought contests for control of departments and professional associations.29 However, whereas many aspiring economists and sociologists were animated by alarm at the harms to the masses wrought by capitalism, the group that led APSA tended to view the problem the other way around. In general, political scientists of this generation concerned themselves more with the damage that ill-conceived or excessive democracy might do to a modern, industrial state.30
However, there was a general sentiment that a doctrinaire commitment to limited government would no longer suffice. It would be the task of a science of politics and administration to guide government’s pursuit of social goals while keeping that pursuit within reasonable limits. Wilson’s one-time Johns Hopkins classmate Albert Shaw captured this general feeling in his presidential address to the APSA just a few years after Goodnow’s, affirming that, “for better or for worse,” new forces—particularly calls for economic regulation—were transforming the country. He was unenthusiastic at this prospect—he preferred “no rules of the game” to “very bad ones” that might “discourage wealth production.” Still it was evident that “everywhere there is … a powerful determination to make use of … governmental power and agency.” If, as he believed, this could not be stopped, then the APSA’s task was to bring a “moderating” and “scientific spirit” to bear on when and how such power might be used.31
Stephen Skowronek casts Wilson’s presidency in this light. For Skowronek, Wilson’s liberal reforms as president were motivated less by a desire to transform society or its basic hierarchies than to preserve the essence of an old social and racial order in new circumstances.32 An examination of the racial entailments of Wilson’s political science lends support to this view. His scholarship was consistently animated by the sense that the old institutions of American politics had failed and only new arrangements could guarantee the kind of society those institutions had once sustained. However, this was not at all unique to Wilson. An orientation to reform as a method of conservation or recuperation of old values and hierarchies was a common theme in political
