While the role of race in the history of social science disciplines such as sociology and anthropology has been fruitfully studied, the study of race and political science remains limited. Recently, some political scientists themselves have also questioned the seeming absence of race from their discipline, leading to questions about “the puzzling place of race in American political science” (Smith, 2004, p. 41). Despite such puzzlement, race clearly played a central role in the formation of the discipline in the late 19th-century and has continued to haunt the discipline since. At the turn of the twentieth century, in their newly founded journals and professional association, political scientists participated in a racial discourse that served to academically legitimate eugenic practices.

Race and State: German Origins
The establishment of political science owed much to the German university system. The country’s first political scientist, Francis Lieber, was a German émigré, while many of the discipline’s founders, such as John Burgess, completed their post-secondary education in Germany (Schmidt, 2005). Aside from implementing German-styled doctoral programs and emphasizing research, early political scientists adopted racial conceptions of the state popular among German philosophers.

For Lieber, Burgess, and the first generation of political scientists, the state was not equivalent to the government. Rather, the state bestowed power to the government. What then was the state? Echoing Hegel, Burgess wrote that it was “the gradual realization…of the universal principles of human nature,” accomplished through the self-organization of an ethnically homogenous community (1890, p. 59). Yet only certain races, according to Burgess, were psychologically capable of reaching this state and the form of government—constitutional democracy—suitable for it. Thanks to their “superior political genius,” the Teutons and their descendants achieved states (Burgess, 1890, p. 4), while, Burgess argued, “American Indians, Asiatics and Africans cannot…produce modern political institutions and ideals” (Burgess quoted in Vitalis, 2010).

This racialized theory of the state, commonly referred to as the “Teutonic Germ Theory,” bore three important consequences. First, given that only Teutonic races were capable of forming states, and, given that political science was the study of the state, much of the world’s population was excluded from the purview of political science. Second, race and racial character were perceived to be inflexible, perhaps even semi-permanent, thereby tempering attempts at racial improvement of the so-called primitive races.

Third, it instructed governments to defend their ethnic homogeneity through securing borders and deporting “ethnically hostile populations” (Burgess quoted in Blatt, 2012, p. 1068). This final point translated into Canada, where Stephen Leacock, McGill’s first political scientist, applied eugenic logic to immigration. While advocating for policies that would encourage immigrants from Northern Europe to come settle in Canada en masse, Leacock rallied against Eastern European and Asian immigration (MacMillan, 2009).

Colonial Governance
As political science’s methodologies and objectives shifted at the turn of the 20th century, so too did conceptions of race. Instead of theorizing the nature of the state in formal and speculative terms, Progressive Era political scientists sought a description and analysis of what a young political scientist named Woodrow Wilson called “government in action” (1887, p. 198). Administration, governance, and empiricism were the watchwords of the next generation of political scientists, yet the boundary between politically-capable races and the pre-political ones was retained in the emerging approach.

The new approach led to a distinctive racial discourse, termed the “science of imperial relations” (Alpheus Henry Snow, 1908, p. 590), which encompassed both the study of tropical colonial governance and, domestically, the management of the so-called “Indian problem” and “negro problem” (Burgess quoted in Vitalis, 2010, p. 921). Political scientists constructed racial boundaries as administrative problems. An example is Paul S. Reinsch, who wrote two books on the subject, Colonial Government (1902) and Colonial Administration (1905). Reinsch surveyed, classified, and evaluated colonial policies of the imperial powers and scientifically framed the civilizing mission in terms of improving racial stock.

The impetus to study imperial relations was the United States’ acquisition of overseas territories. While older scholars such as Burgess opposed this development on the grounds that the United States had not yet satisfied the criteria for a Teutonic state (i.e. ethnic homogeneity), the majority of political scientists were enthusiastic supporters of the American empire in part due to the opportunity to uplift the so-called tropical races. Political scientists, along with the rest of the social sciences, found themselves in imperial governmental positions. University of California’s Bernard Moses was the superintendent of public instruction in the Philippines; the President of the American Political Science Association, W.W. Willoughby was the treasurer of Puerto Rico; and L.S. Rowe worked for the Insular Code Commission (Kramer, 1998). Their colonial encounters were also racial encounters, which led to a slight moderation to their belief in racial uplift. In spite of their best efforts, racial characteristics persisted. In response, political scientists elongated the projected time it would take to achieve race betterment.

The Understanding of Race
Reflecting the broader popular attitude towards race in early 20th century society, political scientists imbued race with more and more of a biological, rather than an historico-philosophical, meaning. Interestingly, it was not a shift towards biological determinism, but rather a “vague sociobiological indeterminism” (George Stocking). Despite the growing acceptance of Mendelian genetics among biologists after 1900, political scientists clung to a seemingly contradictory mix of Lamarckism, climate-based evolutionary theory, and hard heredity. Whereas the discipline’s first generation perceived racial characteristics to be semi-permanent, Progressive Era political scientists saw, with the aid of science and technology, the possibility of change.

Exemplifying the presence of Lamarckian thinking, Paul Reinsch, along with other political scientists, advocated for environmental reform both domestically and abroad, intending to improve the physiology of “modern barbarians” (1905, pp. 35-61). Meanwhile, exemplifying more Mendelian tendencies, political scientists saw race-mixing as a means towards race betterment. To improve the “Malay stock” (i.e. Filipinos), for example, Reinsch proposed policies to encourage inter-marriage with Chinese, who were perceived to be “industrious” (pp. 135-6). Other political scientists sought the same strategy for resolving the “Indian problem,” though with a different goal. Inter-marriage between whites and North American indigenous peoples was seen as a method of genetically diluting and eventually eliminating First Nations people (Blatt, 2004, p. 696).

Political science reached its apogee of racial thinking with the founding of the Journal of Race Development (JDR) in 1910. In addition to various political scientists, authors ranged from psychologist Stanley Hall to the president of the American Eugenics Society, and, as the journal’s title indicates, they were interested in the betterment of the so-called primitive races. In the first issue, editor George Blakeslee described the JDR’s objectives as explaining and theorizing “the methods by which developed peoples may most effectively aid the progress of the undeveloped” (Quoted in Blatt, 2004, p. 694).

But the apogee also signaled an end, as political scientists began to exclude, at least explicitly, race from their analyses following the First World War. While more research needs to be completed to understand this transition, one can observe it in the JDR’s 1919 name-change to The Journal of International Relations, and then again in 1922 to its current title, Foreign Affairs. Despite the discipline’s rejection of race, political scientists’ earlier writings that focused on race formation, racial characteristics, and race-related policies had already justified, and continued to justify, eugenic practices such as segregation, marriage laws, and selective immigration.

-Dexter Fergie

• Blatt, Jessica. “John W. Burgess, the racial state and the making of the science of politics.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 37:6 (2012): 1062-1079.

• Blatt, Jessica. “’To bring out the best that is in their blood’: Race, reform, and civilization in the journal of race development.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 27:5 (2004): 691-709.

• Burgess, John W. Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law. Massachusetts: Ginn and Co, 1890.

• Reinsch, Paul S. Colonial Administration. New York: Macmillan, 1905.

• Reinsch, Paul S. Colonial Government. New York: Macmillan, 1902.

• Schmidt, Brian C. The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations. New York: State University of New York Press, 1998.

• Smith, Rogers M. “The Puzzling Place of Race in American Political Science.” PS: Political Science and Politics 37:1 (2004): 41-5.

• Snow, Alpheus Henry. “Neutralization versus imperialism.” American Journal of International Law 2 (1908):562-90.

• Vitalis, Robert. “The Noble American Science of Imperial Relations and Its Laws of Race Development.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52, no. 4 (2010): 909-38.

• Wilson, Woodrow. “The Study of Administration.” Political Science Quarterly 2, no. 2 (1887): 197-222.

• MacMillan, Margaret. Stephen Leacock. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2009.