The History of White People Read online

  THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE

  ALSO BY NELL IRVIN PAINTER

  Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present

  Southern History across the Color Line

  Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol

  Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919

  The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South

  Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction

  Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Penguin Classic Edition)

  Narrative of Sojourner Truth (Penguin Classic Edition)

  THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE

  NELL IRVIN PAINTER

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  NEW YORK LONDON

  Copyright © 2010 by Nell Irvin Painter

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Painter, Nell Irvin.

  The history of White people / Nell Irvin Painter.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-04934-3

  1. Whites—Race identity—United States.

  2. Whites—United States—History.

  3. United States—Race relations. I. Title.

  E184.A1P29 2010

  305.800973—dc22

  2009034515

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  To Edwin Barber and the Princeton University Library,

  the absolute indispensables.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  1. GREEKS AND SCYTHIANS

  2. ROMANS, CELTS, GAULS, AND GERMANI

  3. WHITE SLAVERY

  4. WHITE SLAVERY AS BEAUTY IDEAL

  5. THE WHITE BEAUTY IDEAL AS SCIENCE

  6. JOHANN FRIEDRICH BLUMENBACH NAMES WHITE PEOPLE “CAUCASIAN”

  7. GERMAINE DE STAËL’S GERMAN LESSONS

  8. EARLY AMERICAN WHITE PEOPLE OBSERVED

  9. THE FIRST ALIEN WAVE

  10. THE EDUCATION OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  11. ENGLISH TRAITS

  12. EMERSON IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN WHITE PEOPLE

  13. THE AMERICAN SCHOOL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

  14. THE SECOND ENLARGEMENT OF AMERICAN WHITENESS

  15. WILLIAM Z. RIPLEY AND THE RACES OF EUROPE

  16. FRANZ BOAS, DISSENTER

  17. ROOSEVELT, ROSS, AND RACE SUICIDE

  18. THE DISCOVERY OF DEGENERATE FAMILIES

  19. FROM DEGENERATE FAMILIES TO STERILIZATION

  20. INTELLIGENCE TESTING OF NEW IMMIGRANTS

  21. THE GREAT UNREST

  22. THE MELTING POT A FAILURE?

  23. ANTHROPOSOCIOLOGY: THE SCIENCE OF ALIEN RACES

  24. REFUTING RACIAL SCIENCE

  25. A NEW WHITE RACE POLITICS

  26. THE THIRD ENLARGEMENT OF AMERICAN WHITENESS

  27. BLACK NATIONALISM AND WHITE ETHNICS

  28. THE FOURTH ENLARGEMENT OF AMERICAN WHITENESS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  INTRODUCTION

  I might have entitled this book Constructions of White Americans from Antiquity to the Present, because it explores a concept that lies within a history of events. I have chosen this strategy because race is an idea, not a fact, and its questions demand answers from the conceptual rather than the factual realm. American history offers up a large bounty of commentary on what it means to be nonwhite, moving easily between alternations in the meaning of race as color, from “colored” to “Negro” to “Afro-American” to “black” to “African American,” always associating the idea of blackness with slavery.”* But little attention has been paid to history’s equally confused and flexible discourses on the white races and the old, old slave trade from eastern Europe.

  I use “white races” in the plural, because for most of the past centuries—when race really came down to matters of law—educated Americans firmly believed in the existence of more than one European race. It is possible, and important, to investigate that other side of history without trivializing the history we already know so well.

  Let me state categorically that while this is not history in white versus black, I do not by any means underestimate or ignore the overwhelming importance of black race in America. I am familiar with the truly gigantic literature that explains the meaning, importance, and honest-to-god reality of the existence of race when it means black. In comparison with this preoccupation, statutory and biological definitions of white race remain notoriously vague—the leavings of what is not black.1 But this vagueness does not indicate lack of interest—quite to the contrary, for another vast historical literature, much less known today, explains the meaning, importance, and honest-to-god reality of the existence of white races.

  It may seem odd to begin a book on Americans in antiquity, a period long before Europeans discovered the Western Hemisphere and thousands of years before the invention of the concept of race. But given the prevalence of the notion that race is permanent, many believe it possible to trace something recognizable as the white race back more than two thousand years. In addition, not a few Westerners have attempted to racialize antiquity, making ancient history into white race history and classics into a lily-white field complete with pictures of blond ancient Greeks. Transforming the ancients into Anglo-Saxon ancestors made classics unwelcoming to African American classicists.2* The blond-ancient-Greek narrative may no longer be taught in schools, but it lives on as a myth to be confronted in these pages. Before launching the trip back to ancient times, however, it may be useful to make a few remarks about the role of science or “science” of race.

  I resist the temptation to place the word “science”—even theories and assertions of the most spurious, pernicious, or ridiculous kind—in quotation marks, for the task of deciding what is sound science and what is cultural fantasy would quickly become all-consuming. Better to note the qualifications of yesterday’s scientists than to brand as mere “science” their thought that has not stood the test of time. I give scholars of repute in their day pride of place in my pages—no matter that some of their thinking has fallen by the wayside.

  TODAY WE think of race as a matter of biology, but a second thought reminds us that the meanings of race quickly spill out of merely physical categories. Even in so circumscribed a place as one book, the meanings of white race reach into concepts of labor, gender, and class and images of personal beauty that seldom appear in analyses of race. Work plays a central part in race talk, because the people who do the work are likely to be figured as inherently deserving the toil and poverty of laboring status. It is still assumed, wrongly, that slavery anywhere in the world must rest on a foundation of racial difference. Time and again, the better classes have concluded that those people deserve their lot; it must be something within them that puts them at the bottom. In modern times, we recognize this kind of reasoning as it relates to black race, but in other times the same logic was applied to people who were white, especially when they were impoverished immigrants seeking work.

  Those at the very bottom were slaves. Slavery has helped construct concepts of white race in two contradictory ways. First, American tradition equates whiteness with freedom while consigning blackness to slavery. The history of unfree white people slumbers in popular forgetfulness, though wh
ite slavery (like black slavery) moved people around and mixed up human genes on a massive scale.* The important demographic role of the various slave trades is all too often overlooked as a historical force. In the second place, the term “Caucasian” as a designation for white people originates in concepts of beauty related to the white slave trade from eastern Europe, and whiteness remains embedded in visions of beauty found in art history and popular culture.

  Today most Americans envision whiteness as racially indivisible, though ethnically divided; this is the scheme anthropologists laid out in the mid-twentieth century. By this reckoning, there were only three real races (“Mongoloid,” “Negroid,” and Caucasoid”) but countless ethnicities. Today, however, biologists and geneticists (not to mention literary critics) no longer believe in the physical existence of races—though they recognize the continuing power of racism (the belief that races exist, and that some are better than others). It took some two centuries to reach this conclusion, after countless racial schemes had spun out countless different numbers of races, even of white races, and attempts at classification produced frustration.

  Although science today denies race any standing as objective truth, and the U.S. census faces taxonomic meltdown, many Americans cling to race as the unschooled cling to superstition. So long as racial discrimination remains a fact of life and statistics can be arranged to support racial difference, the American belief in races will endure. But confronted with the actually existing American population—its distribution of wealth, power, and beauty—the notion of American whiteness will continue to evolve, as it has since the creation of the American Republic.

  THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE

  1

  GREEKS AND SCYTHIANS

  Were there “white” people in antiquity? Certainly some assume so, as though categories we use today could be read backwards over the millennia. People with light skin certainly existed well before our own times. But did anyone think they were “white” or that their character related to their color? No, for neither the idea of race nor the idea of “white” people had been invented, and people’s skin color did not carry useful meaning. What mattered was where they lived; were their lands damp or dry; were they virile or prone to impotence, hard or soft; could they be seduced by the luxuries of civilized society or were they warriors through and through? What were their habits of life? Rather than as “white” people, northern Europeans were known by vague tribal names: Scythians and Celts, then Gauls and Germani.

  But if one asks, say, who are the Scythians? the question sets us off down a slippery slope, for, over time and especially in earliest times, any search for the ancestors of white Americans perforce leads back to non-literate peoples who left no documents describing themselves.1 Thus, we must sift through the intellectual history Americans claim as Westerners, keeping in mind that long before science dictated the terms of human difference as “race,” long before racial scientists began to measure heads and concoct racial theory, ancient Greeks and Romans had their own means of describing the peoples of their world as they knew it more than two millennia ago. And inevitably, the earliest accounts of our story are told from on high, by rulers dominant at a particular time. Power affixes the markers of history.

  Furthermore, any attempt to trace biological ancestry quickly turns into legend, for human beings have multiplied so rapidly: by 1,000 or more times in some two hundred years, and by more than 32,000 times in three hundred years. Evolutionary biologists now reckon that the six to seven billion people now living share the same small number of ancestors living two or three thousand years ago. These circumstances make nonsense of anybody’s pretensions to find a pure racial ancestry. Nor are notions of Western cultural purity any less spurious. Without a doubt, the sophisticated Egyptian, Phoenician, Minoan, and Persian societies deeply influenced the classical culture of ancient Greece, which some still imagine as the West’s pure and unique source. That story is still to come, for the obsession with purity—racial and cultural—arose many centuries after the demise of the ancients. Suffice it to say that our search for the history of white people must begin in the misty mixture of myth and reality that comprises ancient Greek literature.

  Early on, most Greek notions about peoples living along their northeastern border, especially that vaguely known place called the Caucasus, were mythological.2 Known to Westerners since prehistoric times, the Caucasus is a geographically and ethnically complex area lying between the Black and Caspian Seas and flanked north and south by two ranges of the Caucasus Mountains. The northern Caucasus range forms a natural border with Russia; the southern, lesser Caucasus physically separates the area from Turkey and Iran. The Republic of Georgia lies between the disputed region of the Caucasus, Turkey, Armenia, Iran, and Azerbaijan. (See figure 1.1, Black Sea Region.)

  According to Greek mythology, Jason and his Argonauts sought the Golden Fleece in the (Caucasus) land of Colchis (near the present-day Georgian city of Poti) obtaining it from King Aeetes, thanks to the magical powers of the king’s daughter, the princess Medea. In Homer’s Odyssey, Circe, the sister of King Aeetes, transforms half of Odysseus’s men into animals and seduces Odysseus. Later on, Hesiod and Aeschylus take up the tale of Prometheus, son of a Titan, punished for having stolen the secret of fire from Zeus, who chains Prometheus to a mountain in the Caucasus and sends an eagle to peck at his liver every day for thirty thousand years.3 One can see that to the Greeks, almost anything goes on in the Caucasus. Furthermore, Greek mythology accords women of the Caucasus extraordinary powers, whether the magical of Medea and Circe, or the warlike of the Amazons, variously located in a number of places, including the Caucasus. Even today, these myths reverberate.4

  Fig. 1.1. The Black Sea Region today.

  Underlying the idea that all people originated between the Black and the Caspian Seas is the text of Genesis 8:1, which has Noah’s ark coming to rest “on the mountains of Ararat” after the flood. In the thirteenth century Marco Polo located Mount Ararat in Armenia, just south of Georgia in eastern Turkey, at the juncture of Armenia, Iraq, and Iran in the country of the Kurds. At any rate, Mount Ararat, at 5,185 meters, or some 17,000 feet high, is Turkey’s highest mountain and is still believed by many to mark the site of postdiluvian human history in western Asia. Nor have recent events lessened its importance.

  Twentieth-and twenty-first-century wars contest access to oil (South Ossetia, Azerbaijan, Grozny, Maykop, and the Caspian Sea, especially Baku, hold rich old deposits); earlier trade brought slaves, wine, fruit, and other agricultural produce from the valleys along the Black Sea, and a variety of natural resources (e.g., manganese, coal, copper, molybdenum, and tungsten). Current iconography of the Caucasus shows bombed-out cities and oil rigs of Chechnya or bearded nationalists called “terrorists” by the Russians. Occasional photographs of Caucasians show gnarled old people as proof of the life-prolonging powers of yogurt. There was a time when the people of the Caucasus were thought the most beautiful in the world. But documentary images making this case—in pictures, not just words—have proven illusive.

  BY CONTRAST, vague and savage notions had lodged in the Greek mind concerning Scythians and Celts, who lived in what is now considered Europe. Voicing broad ethnic generalities, Greeks had words—Skythai (Scythian) and Keltoi (Celt)—to designate far distant barbarians. Scythian, for instance, simply meant little known, northeastern, illiterate, Stone Age peoples, and Celt denoted hidden people, painted people, strange people, and barbarians to the west. We cannot know what those people called themselves, for the Greek names stuck. Nor can we know how many of those situated in northern, western, and eastern Europe, two or three thousand years ago or earlier, became the biological ancestors of nineteenth-century German, English, and Irish people and twentieth-century Italians, Jews, and Slavs.5 We know from Greek descriptions of their habits that, whether chiefs or slaves, all had light-colored skin.

  For a sense of this vagueness, recall the naming skills of fifteenth-century Europeans a
s they looked west in the Americas. Their backs to the Atlantic Ocean, Europeans described sparsely settled people they had never seen before as “Indians.” Such precision regarding faraway, unlettered peoples has been commonplace throughout the ages. Those at a distance became the Other and, easily conquered, the lesser. But not in antiquity because of race. Ancient Greeks did not think in terms of race (later translators would put that word in their mouths); instead, Greeks thought of place. Africa meant Egypt and Libya. Asia meant Persia as far to the east as India. Europe meant Greece and neighboring lands as far west as Sicily. Western Turkey belonged to Europe because Greeks lived there. Indeed, most of the Greek known world lay to the east and south of what would become recognizable later as Europe.

  Mostly, Greek scholars focused on climate to explain human difference. Humors arising from each climate’s relative humidity or aridness explained a people’s temperament. Where the seasons do not change, people were labeled placid. Where seasons shift dramatically, their dispositions were said to display “wildness, unsociability and spirit. For frequent shocks to the mind impart wildness, destroying tameness and gentleness.” Those words come from Hippocrates’ Airs, Waters, and Places.6*