part in promoting this orientation. Congressional Government, which was published in 1885, had been an argument for just such a program of reform. That work pointed to a radical disjuncture between the constitutional theory of balanced, separated powers and what Wilson saw as the post–Civil War reality of “congressional supremacy.” For Wilson, the central problem with American government was exemplified by the ability of a minority in Congress to enact radical policies, such as Reconstruction (that “extraordinary carnival of public crime” that resulted when freed slaves were thrust into “unnatural” ascendancy over whites).33
For most constitutional analysts, the fragmentation of the American system was its defining democratic feature, in that it hindered a potentially tyrannical concentration of power at the top. Wilson saw attachment to this idea as backward-looking and sentimental, arguing that in a context where the real threat came from tyrannical minorities, a strong executive better guaranteed liberty. His model was the British system in which a ruling party controlling both parliament and the prime minister’s office provided clearer lines of accountability and democratic control.
Wilson’s argument was provocative. In advocating a fundamental reordering of the constitutional system, it displaced Burgess’s “ideal American commonwealth”34 from the pinnacle of political development. It suggested that the flowering of Teutonic liberty might be off course in America or, worse, that no course might be charted at all. Wilson’s empiricism was certainly limited—it has been widely noted that he never actually visited Congress while conducting his research. Still, the book was exciting in that it sought to analyze “actual practices” of politics, and not just juridical forms. It received praiseful notice for the sharp contrast it drew between the ideal and the real, as well as for its sense that present politics were more dynamic than previously suggested.
Still, Congressional Government was far from a radical screed. As it happened, the terms of present politics were not good, and the changes Wilson advocated were meant to recuperate what could be salvaged of a lost past. Crucially, this included a racial order that had been disrupted by the Civil War and Reconstruction. In Wilson’s estimation, after Lincoln’s death, organized minorities who controlled the committee system in Congress—notably the Radical Republicans pushing Reconstruction policies—had run roughshod over the weak executive, resulting in such tyrannical measures as federal election inspectors enforcing black voting rights over the objections of southern whites and the officials whites had elected.35 For Wilson, the fragmentation of government meant to keep it in check instead provided opportunities for an extremist minority to gain unwonted power and to foist an alien people onto the American electorate.
In the 1885 book, the (mostly implied) remedy was a more deliberative legislature, closely integrated with the executive branch. In his 1908 Constitutional Government, Wilson would place more emphasis on the executive, looking” to the President as the unifying force in our complex system, the leader both of his party and of the nation,” and as a prudent antidote to an unreflective, minority-driven Congress.36 As Wilson saw it, the executive reflected the naturally conservative will of the (white) “people” as a whole. That is, the executive embodied or gave expression to something quite akin to Burgess’s “state,” still identified with the Anglo-Saxon element of the American population but now residing in the presidency rather than in the judiciary. Burgess had looked to the “aristocracy of the robe” to act as the state’s check on the capricious power of the legislature.37 For Wilson, a stronger, more integrated presidential government would take on this role, protecting tradition and safeguarding (whites’) liberty against alien influences and the misguided crusades of ideological minorities. Wilson’s proposed radical restructuring and strengthening of American government was a way to direct and temper government action in the service of existing hierarchies—the forms and methods would be new, but they would be deployed for old purposes.
“Not Factitious but Anthropological”
Wilson sought constitutional reordering in order to safely accommodate new realities—including, especially, the reality of a free African American population. The question of how to accommodate American institutions to a new, post-Reconstruction racial settlement loomed equally large at APSA meetings and in political science journals. Some commentators, like Wilson, would recommend new political arrangements. Others would turn primarily to administration, suggesting that if racial others had (against all scientific principles) been given a formal, legal grant of equality, some flexibility in the application of those laws would be called for.
Across generational and theoretical divides, political scientists were united in a near-consensus that African Americans were inferior, politically incompetent, and unsuited to live under a legal system constituted by and for Anglo-Saxons.38 There was also general agreement that by their very presence in the United States African Americans challenged social peace and the viability of constitutional principles, and that any attempt to integrate them into American democracy necessarily stemmed from a catastrophic misunderstanding of that basic truth.
In an early volume of PSQ, William Chauncy Langdon articulated a principle that would go largely unchallenged in political science for some time. As he saw it, “The negro [was] not an Anglo-Saxon, or a Celt, or Scandinavian—only undeveloped and with a black skin…. The African [was] on the contrary a wholly distinct race, and the obstacles to social equality and political co-efficiency” with “our own” race were “not factitious but anthropological.”39 These judgments stood through the early years of the twentieth century (and beyond), and were voiced at APSA’s meetings and in its publications no less than they had been at Columbia and in PSQ. That is, as much as the first generation of U.S.-trained scholars may have sought to radically reorient their discipline, they were united with the founding generation in their sense that no account of politics could be scientific without an understanding of the significance of racial difference.
Even a cursory examination of Political Science Quarterly shows that the Burgess/Dunning/Wilson line on Reconstruction reigned unchallenged there for years. PSQ’s monotony in this regard certainly owes much to Dunning’s and Burgess’s influence at Columbia. However, the birth of the APSA and the launching of the American Political Science Review in 1906 led to no slackening of interest in these topics, nor did it lead to any real stirrings of dissent from the reigning estimation of Reconstruction, African Americans in general, or the prospect of racial equality on almost any front. What developed instead was a consensus that the emerging Jim Crow regime of racial segregation and stratification represented a moderate, pragmatic response to the realities of racial difference. The fact that it might occasionally do violence to constitutional strictures simply demonstrated that those strictures had been based on an inadequate and misinformed political theory that the new century could ill-afford.
In some representative examples drawn from the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, black people appeared in PSQ and, later, in papers presented at the APSA and articles in the APSR, as the “half-civilized,”40 “alien” element within the American population. At best, blacks were depicted as the “permanent[ly] … indolent and thriftless,”41 “spoil of the politician,”42 “unfit” to vote,43 lacking “initiative and inventive genius,” and prone to chicken-stealing44; at worst, “savage”45 and determined to “outrage and murder” Southern whites’ “young daughters.”46
On occasion, commenters referred with relief to the idea that negro unfitness might be a self-limiting problem. For example, in a PSQ review, Columbia’s Gary N. Calkins found grounds for optimism in Frederick Hoffman’s “convincing” thesis that “the American negro” was so racially feeble as to be headed for extinction. To Calkins’s cautious relief, “the race of negroes[’] … downward grade,” meant it was less likely to “menace our republican institutions.”47 Another author noted approvingly that “a very large proportion of the negroes born in this country die in childhood,”
