Administration and the Other: Explorations of Diversity and Marginalization in the Political Administrative State

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“This is a comprehensively researched, convincingly written book, detailing institutional racism acts on the part of public officials and public administrators. I am sure that Kyle Farmbry’s ‘The Other’ will become a theoretical framework for others researching similar topics. A significant addition to the teaching of public administration.” —Sylvester Murray, Savannah State University

Administration and The Other examines the social construction of groups of people and resultant policy impacts in the discourse of the American Republic from before its founding to the present. The book suggests that from prerevolutionary interactions between early colonialists and Native Americans to recent immigration debates, discourse on “The Other” has resulted in the development of policies that have led to further marginalization, community division, and harm to scores of innocents within the public sphere. Ultimately, Administration and The Other examines the construction of “The Other” from a sociological and historical framework to engage students and scholars of political and administrative processes in using the often unspoken history of the field, as part of a larger historical framework, to explore how policy has been shaped in relation to marginalized communities. By presenting elements of history that are frequently not entered into the administrative and political discourse, the book aims to frame a conversation that might lead to the integration of thoughts about the often marginalized Other into discussions of policy-making and policy-implementation processes.

KYLE FARMBRY is assistant professor in the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University–Newark and assistant professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

For orders and information please contact the publisher Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706 1-800-462-6420 • www.lexingtonbooks.com

ADMINISTRATION AND THE OTHER

“Through a largely historical analysis, Kyle Farmbry’s book stimulates important engagement of the framing of the role of ‘The Other’ in the U.S. administrative state. His book offers critical consideration of otherness across myriad time periods and groups while encouraging continuous reflection by twenty-first-century public administration scholars and students. It will especially challenge graduate students to reconsider what they think they know about public administration.” —Susan T. Gooden, Virginia Commonwealth University

FARMBRY

Public Administration • Political Science

ADMINISTRATION AND THE OTHER EXPLORATIONS OF DIVERSITY AND MARGINALIZATION IN THE POLITICAL ADMINISTRATIVE STATE

KYLE FARMBRY

ADMINISTRATION AND THE OTHER

ADMINISTRATION AND THE OTHER Explorations of Diversity and Marginalization in the Political Administrative State

Kyle Farmbry

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LIT TLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Farmbry, Kyle, 1970– Administration and the other : explorations of diversity and marginalization in the political administrative state / Kyle Farmbry. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-1910-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7391-1910-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-3387-3 (electronic) ISBN-10: 0-7391-3387-X (electronic) 1. United States—Politics and government—History. 2. Public administration—United States—History. 3. Humanism. I. Title. JK411.F37 2009 351.01—dc22 2008042313 Printed in the United States of America

⬁ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.

Contents

Preface

vii

Introduction

xi

1 Theoretical Foundations

1

Part One: The Early Republic 2 The Expert in a Period of American Enlightenment 3 Slavery 4 The Native American as The Other

17 25 37

Part Two: The Founding Era 5 The Social Sciences and The Other 6 The African American Male as The Other 7 The Immigrant as The Other—Part I

55 69 75

Part Three: Transitional Concerns 8 Housing The Other 9 The War on Poverty 10 Educating The Other

87 95 113

—v—

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Part Four: The Other in an Era of Late Modernity 11 Welfare and The Other 12 Counting and Categorizing The Other 13 The Immigrant as The Other—Part II

127 139 147

Conclusion

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References

165

Index

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About the Author

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Preface

EVERAL WEEKS AFTER BEGINNING MY GRADUATE STUDIES, I

found myself sitting in a café near Washington D.C.’s Dupont Circle. After the first few days of a life that I knew would be increasingly buried in textbooks, I wanted to schedule some time for reading that was not required for classes. I had just purchased James Loewen’s Lies My Teachers Told Me, a book that several people had recommended. I had been forewarned that I would find elements of Loewen’s work disturbing—particularly components that would force me to revisit many of my assumptions about the actions and motives of many of the individuals about whom I thought I had learned in lectures and textbooks. One of the people Loewen examines in depth is Woodrow Wilson, a figure I had encountered on numerous occasions throughout high school, in my undergraduate years, and most recently in graduate school. In high school, I learned of a Wilson who led the nation through the First World War, served as the primary architect of The League of Nations, and articulated an internationalist vision that laid the groundwork for much of our modern United Nations system. He was introduced to most of us in my eleventh grade history class, and later in an undergraduate class on American history, as a promoter of an internationalist agenda grounded in notions of the global public good. In graduate school, the images of Wilson would continue along this positive thread. In my introductory Public Administration classes, I learned that Wilson’s 1887 essay The Study of Administration had led some scholars, particularly in the years leading to and following the centennial of his essay’s publication, to regard him as one of the architects of the field of Public Administration.1

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The Wilson that Loewen presented, however, differed from the image of the man I had learned about in my secondary school and from the picture that my graduate classes would paint. This Wilson actively turned back many of the mild advances that had been made in the early 1900s to integrate the federal civil service. He was a man who, upon viewing David Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation, a film widely recognized for its negative depiction of African Americans during the Reconstruction era, observed “It is like writing history with lightning and my only regret is that it is all so true.”2 And he was a man who described the newly freed slaves of the Reconstruction era as “unschooled in self-control; never sobered by the discipline of self support, never established in any habit of prudence; excited by a freedom that they do not understand, exalted by false hopes; bewildered and without leaders, yet insolent and aggressive; sick of work, covetous of pleasure—a host of dusky children untimely put out of school.”3 As I became more immersed in the field of public administration over the next few years, I found it distressing that fellow students and later colleagues either failed to recognize the segregationist side of Wilson or chose to ignore it. My struggle around Wilson became the first of several points of dissonance I have had with the field of public administration and its handling of matters of diversity and difference. As I found myself reflecting on the stages of evolution of the American political and administrative state and the marginalization of people through policies designed and implemented in the perceived interest of the state, I became further convinced that there were a series of critical conversations about marginalization and difference in the field that simply were not occurring. Administration and The Other is my attempt at contributing to such a needed conversation. In considering many of the challenges that we face in matters of societal diversity, our inability to have an honest dialogue about how we develop our understanding of group construction and the impact of such construction on policy development keeps us on a road that prolongs ongoing challenges. History provides us with several guideposts for understanding some of the thought processes of individuals who came before us in shaping various governance procedures, and specifically for the subject of this book—procedures pertaining to governance and The Other. How we frame strategies that will affect groups of Others might be a by-product of lessons about the framing of policies and procedures learned through past political and administrative processes. Because the writing of a book is very much a process in which various people are critical in the development of the product, I owe many people several bits of gratitude, and I am certain that by naming a few I will unfortunately leave out others who were important to this process (I hope that those left out

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will forgive me). First, I want to thank Dean Marc Holzer and other colleagues of mine at Rutgers–Newark—Suzanne Piotrowski, Mara Sidney, Lamar Bennett, and Keesha Middlemass—for encouragement throughout this process. The Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies at Rutgers provided funding for needed research support. Graduate students Portia Dinoso, Tulay Cetinkaye, Atta Ceesay, Michael Vorgetts, Mackenzie McGrew, Morgan Southwood, and Alex Henderson helped in tracking down information, reading drafts, providing feedback, and providing much of the support that I quickly learned is a vital part of a project of this nature. Jennifer Ward provided critical copyediting assistance and feedback on the general flow of the book’s chapters. Friends such as Anne Visser, Steve Levy, Steve Lanier, Mike and Heather Libonati, and Bret and Suzanne Caldwell helped provide the various needed distractions, occasional escapes, and writing retreats that helped to bring this effort to closure. Finally, my parents, Larry and Deidre Farmbry, provided guidance and friendship through the years leading to the completion of this project and all of my other endeavors. It is to them that I dedicate this book.

Notes 1. Examples of such work in which Wilson’s image is cast in such a framework in relation to the field include Cooke (2007), Martin (1988), Graham (1993), and Rabin and Bowman (1984). 2. James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. (New York: Touchstone Books, 1996), 21. 3. Rayford W. Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson. (London: Collier Books, 1969), 378.

Introduction Diversity and the Administrative State

OR THE PROBLEM OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY,” noted

W. E. B. DuBois in his 1903 work The Souls of Black Folk, “is the problem of the color line.”1 Published just forty-one years following the Emancipation Proclamation, and in an era when economic and political segregation was the norm in the country, DuBois’ words speak to much of the reality within the United States and across the rest of the globe over the past century. The power of hindsight allows us to look back on the years since DuBois made that observation and find it difficult to argue with his foretelling. Indeed, on our own shores and in distant lands, race and differences between people have shaped a number of policies that have had dramatic effects on the course of events. Difference, whether in color, religion, class, or nationality, has played a role in most, if not all, division between people. In a nation and a world in which our interactions cross cultural and racial lines with increasing regularity, administrative, political, and institutional roles in moderating such difference become increasingly vital. DuBois’ words were written with a focus on drawing attention to the lives and conditions of the hundreds of thousands of African Americans who were living in the rural South as sharecroppers. They also applied to the lives of scores of African Americans who were beginning to move to northern industrial cities in what would later be referred to as the first great northern migration. The experiences of many African Americans at the time were shaped by countless moments of struggle that largely resulted from the roles socially prescribed for them. Much of that prescription was at the hands of political and

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administrative officials whose personal viewpoints and biases molded the conditions under which many people lived. The dawn of the twenty-first century has already been marked by questions of diversity and the state. We began with questions of categorization and the Census. How, we wondered, should people, in a nation in which there had been an increase in diversity and the intermixing of racial groups, define themselves for Census purposes? In many states and communities, the checking of boxes to identify oneself for government statistics triggered a number of debates on the implications of how the numbers would be interpreted and how they would lead to further understanding of who, at least demographically, we are. In California, this debate emerged in the form of Proposition 54, which in 2003 was placed on the ballot to amend the state constitution to limit the use by government agencies of racial classification data within the policy process. Ultimately defeated, this proposition gave rise to numerous questions about whether government should categorize people and how the results of such categorization would be used in a larger policymaking and implementation context. Interestingly, the backdrop of much of this discussion occurred at a time when science was beginning to provide us with new data on our differences and similarities than we had previously encountered. With genetic research generated from the Human Genome Project in hand, researchers such as Collins and Mansoura, for example, informed us in 2001 that all humans are 99.9 percent the same on a genetic level. As they observed, “It is increasingly clear that there is no scientific basis for defining precise ethnic or racial boundaries . . . and those who wish to draw such boundaries cannot use science as a legitimate justification.”2 It took only a few short years for some scientists, however, to begin asking about the limitations and meanings of the 0.1 percent that remained as a genetic difference. How we come to understand such marginal differences and their value in contrast to our similarities will certainly carry numerous implications for shaping societal institutions. These discussions of genetic difference were also occurring at a time when researchers were beginning to discover more about conscious and subconscious roles and the framing of racial perceptions. Despite the fact that numerous surveys demonstrate that there has been a steady decline in racism in U.S. society over the past fifty years, the complexities of bias are increasingly acknowledged in the social science literature.3 Research by Greenwald and colleagues (1995, 2000, 1998), for example, on implicit and automatic prejudice has provided a framework for understanding some of the subconscious positive and negative associations that people have about various racial groups.4 Ultimately, their work suggests that, despite positive depictions that we may present when asked about our own biases and stereotyping, unconscious fac-

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tors do impact how we perceive members of various groups. As a result, we are led to numerous questions about how such bias might manifest itself in various settings. It also leads us to numerous questions about how to balance the dual realities of genetic science and our conscious and subconscious biases, which have constructed and placed meaning on difference. In the years following the attacks of September 11, 2001, shifts in policies related to security procedures in the United States have become commonplace. The design and implementation of the Patriot Act—and its reauthorization— have led to questions about group profiling based on ethnic and racial backgrounds. In an era of growing tensions between various ethnic groups shaped by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, tensions with Iran, and a rising concern about the Middle East, we have seen a rise in biases about and between groups in the United States. A March 2006 survey reported in the Washington Post illustrates this concern. The survey noted that an increasing proportion of Americans have an unfavorable view of Islam and view Muslims as being prone to violence.5 The constructed reality imposed upon the person of Middle Eastern background has been affected by a widespread, increasingly negative consciousness of people of descent from this region as being The Other. In 2005, we witnessed the destruction by natural forces of major parts of New Orleans and what became the largest mass-evacuation of a city in U.S. history. The shock of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction in New Orleans was exacerbated by images of hordes of low-income African Americans being boarded in the city’s Superdome. In time, a set of vital questions arose. Where would people be housed once they left New Orleans? What role would government assume in providing for the transitions these people would face in their lives? Not long after what became a mass movement of people into new communities, we began to witness perceptions in several cities and towns of the newcomers changing. In some instances what started as acts of charity— as towns and communities opened up—shifted to situations of apprehension as people began to try to make sense of who these newcomers were. In these instances, the policymaker and the policy implementer played critical roles. Policymakers decided what questions would be asked in the Census, and administrators then asked those questions. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it was policymakers and administrators who launched into a discourse and policy process that led to the development, design, and implementation of policies that shaped how people would be examined for the sake of public security. It was also administrators and policymakers who developed evacuation and relocation strategies for people from hurricane-ravaged sections of the Gulf Coast in Hurricane Katrina’s wake. In each of these cases, issues of difference have played a significant role in the formal and informal discourse and in policy design and implementation processes. This intersection of

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discourse, difference, and policy formulation helps to frame Administration and The Other.

The Theoretical Context The theoretical framework for Administration and The Other is based on three epistemological foundations, categorized within the archeology of knowledge, the positionality of knowledge, and the sociology of knowledge. These frameworks examine in-depth the processes by which we create meaning from the world around us. “Others” are a component of our objective world. How we construct this world is a matter for examination. By exploring some initial theoretical considerations, I attempt to provide a starting point for the framing of discussions related to how meaning is shaped around a concept of The Other. By engaging readers in reflection on how “Others” are constructed in political and administrative discourse and the effect of such constructions on policy development, my hope is that we might be led to more thoughtful reflection on the development and implementation of policies pertaining to such groups of Others. The theoretical context for Administration and The Other also touches upon key questions related to the role of humanism in the field of public administration. This is framed largely at a time when I fear that we are experiencing rapid erosion of relationships between people and the societies that bind them. Increasingly, “Others” are objectified in our society. By exploring in detail the processes by which The Other has been defined in political and administrative discourse, and turned into a part of our objective reality, we might be in a better position to explore how such definitions shape the evolution and implementation of policy. Humanism is a concept that has been open to a great deal of debate in its meaning. It is a notion in which thinkers, often in Western-centered humanities, ground their work. It also, however, provides a framework for critiquing a society for the ultimate health of that society. It is such complexity of thought, grounded in our ability to reflect rationally and critically on our society, that adds to who we are, and more importantly, to who we might be. In his Letter on Humanism, Heidegger provided a definition for humanism and established a context for exploring in detail the opening of a debate on what makes up humanism. According to him, the humanistic endeavor is grounded as a framework for examining one’s own being and one’s relation to The Other. I would argue that this stage in the evolution of our world is one that will increasingly be shaped by our ability to engage with one another across lines of difference. The humanism I advocate for is grounded in the recognition of

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complexities of our constructed difference as a factor that will influence such construction. Thus the endeavor I hope readers will undertake in conjunction with their reading of this book is one of understanding and one of struggle against influences that far too frequently lead us to simplify the complexities of social processes between different groups of people. For a public administrator or a policymaker, an appreciation of the socially constructed elements of this complexity is vital. For me, the humanistic goal in an administrative context is one of facilitating reflective action in a framework that recognizes the complexities of the world and the people around us. This reflection should not, I strongly urge, be a framework for more critical thinking, but more of a mechanism for developing a critical consciousness that is manifested in our actions toward one another.

Diversity in Public Administration: Conceptual Frameworks I hesitate to refer to this endeavor as one that explores matters of diversity in the fields of public administration and public policy. Indeed, if anything, Administration and The Other grows from a concern that I have about how we have explored the questions of diversity in these fields, primarily from the perspective of policy development and management-process development. What is lacking, with a few exceptions, is a foundation for encouraging critical reflection on diversity. With this concern in mind, I have attempted to shape this book in a slightly different way from many other explorations of diversity in the field of public administration. The questions that I focus on are not so much those of policy processes and policy approaches to the administrative challenge. I am more interested in leveraging reflection in individual and public consciousness on the processes through which we build political and administrative discourse on the differences among us. I am interested in how we conceptualize one another and the effect of such conceptualizations on the design and enactment of public policies. Four approaches tend to shape how the concept of diversity is examined in the field of public administration. The first is consideration of diversity from a representative context: How many people of one group or another work in particular agencies? Second is a theme that explores cultural competencies in the field. This relatively recent area of emphasis focuses on questions of enhancing the abilities of administrators to work with people of different backgrounds. Third are areas of social equity, which since the early 1970s have linked concepts of social justice to questions of diversity. Finally are management questions—with an emphasis on examining strategies for leveraging

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differences between people for the benefit of an organization’s goals. We don’t tend to explore some of the historical questions related to the inclusion and exclusion of various groups within political and administrative discourse. Nor do we tend to examine the contextual framework, which I would argue helps us to better understand how the shapers of the political and administrative discourse framed their understanding of the marginalized groups who were frequently excluded from such discourse. The Other in a Political and Administrative Framework “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us, instead of our Anglicanizing them, and will never adopt our language or customs any more than they can acquire our complexion?” asked Benjamin Franklin in reflecting on the members of a large German community near Philadelphia, who were for him one of the groups of Others about whom he was concerned.6 For Franklin, in a world of competition between European descendents in colonial America, there was some concern about Germans living in the largely English colony of Pennsylvania. For Franklin, this Other was a German settler—a person whose difference was largely based on national origin. His comment about the German “aliens” points to the fact that, even within early political and administrative discourse, The Other has been a central character. Charles Beard and the historians his work has influenced argue that the constitutional debates between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists laid the framework that further helps us to comprehend notions of The Other. According to Beard, the constitutional process was one shaped by wealthy elites who kept relatively narrow self-interests at the core of their framing endeavors. For them, the landless were among those who led Shay’s Rebellion and other revolts against the system established under the Articles of Confederation. It was largely this group of the landless that the framers needed both to protect and to protect themselves against. Clearly, there were others, such as African Americans and women, who at the time were objectified and/or marginal participants in the political discourse. Questions about government’s role in determining the activities of various Others influenced many of the years of the 1800s. The Civil War, its challenge to slavery, and the role of Reconstruction all led to questions of Otherness in policy, specifically in relation to the perceptions of the capabilities of slaves and, later, freedmen and their role in society. The 1800s also saw the effects of the Indian Removal Acts, which facilitated the creation of administrative systems of control over Native Americans and were based on how Otherness was constructed in the eyes of the policymaker and administrator of the time.

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U.S. public administration scholars view the 1880s as a critical period in the evolution of the field. Prior to the late 1800s, government in the United States was seen as primarily a political process. The field’s evolution paralleled the rise of industrial processes in the United States, and the resulting redefinition of class systems and structures mirrored the changes in industrial society. Ultimately, with the movement of people and their further interaction came processes for defining and redefining who groups were. In an era of rapid modernism—in which the concept of one right way set up a dynamic for opposition between groups—the notion of them and us became replicable in various social contexts. Two major trends resulted and would rapidly alter the dynamics related to conceptualizations of The Other and administrative responses. First, rapid movement to urban industrial centers from the late 1880s to the early 1900s led to the transformation of the United States from a rural nation to an urban one. As a result of changing realities of proximity, people were forced to think about and view each other within a different set of frameworks from before. Second, many of those individuals moving into urban regions were coming from various parts of Europe that had not previously provided a large source of immigrants to the United States. As a result, cities became increasingly diverse, but with groups of individuals from communities that had not been previously represented. New immigrants from countries in central and eastern Europe brought with them new stereotypes about who they were and the patterns of how they lived. The progressives framing administrative systems often responded to this change in urban demographics in ways that today we might find ourselves questioning. Many of these approaches have their foundations in the mechanisms of design, implementation, and evaluation of policies that pertain to people within a society and that make up the core of much of public administration. Discourse, particularly with those who are at the center of the development and design of policies, is an often-overlooked component of the equation. Policies designed and implemented—particularly those that will affect the lives of others—should have perspectives that take into consideration the complexities of the human situations that undergird the realities of a given time. By designing policies without an attempt to understand who truly makes up the impacted Other, and instead simplifying for our understanding who they are, we negate potential approaches that could be critical to effective and engaging administrative procedures.

Who is The Other? Documenters of our social history have impacted who The Other is in our national consciousness. At the beginning of the twentieth century, for example,

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photojournalist and author Jacob Riis attempted to provide an image for his readers of the demographic changes in many of New York’s communities in his book How the Other Half Lives. The work of Riis and others writing during the era provided a foundation for various municipal policies that helped shape the Progressive Era. Riis’ work shaped imagery of the immigrant communities forming in New York and influenced the evolution of public and voluntary sector responses to these groups. During the Second World War, construction of The Other in political and administrative discourse made it easier for Franklin D. Roosevelt to sign Executive Order 9066, which led to the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans in camps in the western United States. The signing of this act in several ways represented a culmination of years of anti-Asian sentiment in the United States. This sentiment had been legitimated in such acts as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, a 1922 Supreme Court ruling that Japanese immigrants could not become naturalized American citizens, and a 1924 law that outlawed further Japanese immigration. With the northern migration of the 1950s–1970s, a largely invisible population of African Americans began to claim greater ownership in their society, and became increasingly recognized in many of the communities of the northern industrialized settings. That time period also witnessed discussions about roles in educational settings, particularly as Brown v. Board of Education gave America insight into the classrooms of African American children and the lack of equality in educational access. Riots in Watts and in other urban communities during the late 1960s leveraged further awareness of the need to respond to social inequities rooted throughout our nation. Finally, in this post-9/11 world, The Other might be viewed as the person of Middle Eastern descent who is viewed with suspicion as he or she boards a plane, rides a bus, or goes about the daily activities of his or her life. Or The Other might be viewed as the individual in New Orleans whose dual reality of being poor and African American was evident in post-Katrina imagery and reworked as we wrestled with the realization that we are still—despite a veneer of relative affluence—an America of multiple economic and social realities.

Organization of the Book Administration and The Other begins with an exploration of the theoretical framework through which meaning is constructed and asks how that meaning might be applied to the development of policies pertaining to people in specific contexts. Chapter 1 examines the theoretical foundations and histo-

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ries underscoring the archeology, the positionality, and sociology of knowledge and explores their implications in political and administrative discourse. The book is then divided into four parts. Part I focuses on the founding and pre-founding years of the Republic and on some of the processes of conceptualizing various groups within the context of Otherness. The social, political, and economic characteristics shaping the years leading to the formation of the American Republic and the first several decades of the Republic, in turn, helped to frame early conceptualizations of and institutional reactions to The Other. This era was one in which questions of the role of different groups of people within geographic boundaries became increasingly relevant. The age of discovery had largely ended, and now that people knew about the existence of other people, questions about how they would live with one another surfaced. The constructed processes that evolved helped to frame some of these means of interaction. This period also consisted of an era when those settling in what would become the colonies, and the Republic, began to wrestle with questions of how to both conceptualize and handle people who were identified as being different from themselves. It is a result of such questions that political and administrative systems during the colonial era, the Revolutionary era, and the early years of the Republic were able to shape images of The Other. Chapter 2, which appears in this section, explores the pre-constitutional and constitutional eras in the United States. I examine in particular the framing of the era of American enlightenment and the notion of independence as articulated in the years leading to and including the war for independence in the United States. Between the years of the American Revolution and the framing of the Constitution, a critical discourse related to the development of notions of The Other took place within the general polity. Chapter 2 explores the roles of these perspectives in determining who was included in and who was excluded from that discourse. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the experiences of two of the more marginalized groups during the early years of the Republic, the African slaves (and the children of the initial slaves) and Native American communities that interacted with the colonial and later American powers. In both instances, constructed imagery affected the development of policies pertaining to these groups. These images resulted in the gradual metamorphosis of these groups and the resultant shaping of imagery based on that metamorphosis. In the case of the slave, it was a shift from initial indenture, the status provided to the first African arrivals in the Jamestown colonies, to one of chattel property—which was the status that emerged as slavery became more intertwined in American society. In the case of Native Americans, images framed in the literature and discourse of colonies and the young American nation portraying Native

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Americans as savages served to justify various acts of war and land claims by colonial and American powers. Part II focuses on what is frequently referred to as the Founding Era of American Public Administration, the forty years between 1880 and 1920. This period saw the nexus of several critical components in the development of the administrative state. It was the period in which Wilson’s 1887 essay “The Study of Administration” first appeared. It was also the period in which the Pendleton Act, the 1913 Income Tax Act, and other key pieces of legislation that further shaped the administrative state were passed. This period, also referred to as the Progressive Era, was shaped by numerous social concerns such as massive urbanization, immigration, and the reshifting of class structures in many communities in the United States. Three discussions of otherness vis-àvis the political and administrative framework are explored in this section. In chapter 5, I examine the rise of the social sciences, with an emphasis on three areas that framed early twentieth century social inquiry—economics, sociology, and political science. These areas served as foundations for inquiry into political and administrative processes and as a means for framing the contextualization of Others within U.S. society. Ultimately, methods of this era helped to shape the American political and administrative state for much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In a field such as public administration, which has its roots in these three areas, comprehending some of the early processes in each discipline for conceptualizing groups has an impact on how the field today reacts and responds to differences. In chapter 6, I explore factors of administrative and political inaction related to one of the more pressing social issues of the Progressive Era—the increasing incidents of African American male lynching that occurred at the time. Part of the justification for such wide-scale acceptance of lynching stemmed from imagery of the African American male as The Other. Much of this image shifted in popular literature and social science research in ways that helped to justify in the minds of many civic and political leaders a general acceptance of this widespread lynching. Chapter 7 is the first of two chapters examining the immigrant as The Other. The chapter specifically reviews the early years of the immigrant debate—a debate that led to the passage of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. Here, I examine the link between notions of immigration and urbanization—two dynamics that contributed to changing demographic patterns within many cities at the time. Such trends had a dramatic impact on the development of the administrative state—a phenomenon that will be examined in-depth in the chapter—as well as responses for addressing this issue of immigration. Part III explores The Other in a period of transition between modernity and late modernity in the United States. This era was contextualized by the

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early stages of a deindustrialization process—a process that occurred as major segments of previously excluded populations began to move to areas where there was a belief that there would be a number of employment opportunities. This was also a period during which principles of rationality and scientism were interjected into various areas of the planning process and processes related to the social sciences. Finally, this was an era in which an awareness of the rights of people played a central role in shaping how people would conceptualize their frameworks for interaction with one another. Groups of previously discounted Others were mobilizing resources of different types to move against the various patterns of social control that had been shaped to keep them in place. Chapter 8 introduces the great northern migration of the 1940s and 1950s, with an emphasis on how political and administrative systems responded to the thousands of African Americans who moved to northern industrial cities. I examine one social policy arena in particular: public housing policy. Chicago, one of the cities most directly affected by the demographic shifts of the northern migration and the 1949 Housing Act, provides the background for much of the chapter. Public housing policy correlated with the development of policies of urban renewal which, though stated to be implemented with a goal of providing homes for the individuals and families needing them, added to patterns and processes of displacement and marginalization of the era. Chapter 9 examines depictions of The Other during the War on Poverty of the 1960s. During this period, the writings of social observers such as John Kenneth Galbraith, Michael Harrington, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan launched debates on the construction of social policies and processes and framed conceptualizations of “the poor” as The Other. This was a time when the image of the poor underwent a major transformation in policy discourse, moving from a view of a rural Appalachian white to that of an urban African American. The work of many of the social scientists and social observers of the time affected this image transformation and the impact of such imagery on the development of resultant antipoverty policy programs of the era. This era also witnessed the emergence of processes within the social sciences for measuring, contextualizing, and evaluating policies, particularly policies relating to the poor. Chapter 10 examines The Other within the context of educational policies during the 1970s. It focuses in particular on a key policy issue of the 1970s: the exploration of busing as a strategy for ensuring equal access to educational opportunities and the resultant protests in the city of Boston as it began to implement its busing strategy. While Boston was not unusual in the opposition to busing in many of its communities, it does provide a framework for

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exploring the crossroads in various tensions and perspectives that characterized other debates related to strategies for school integration. Part IV explores cases of Otherness in an era of late modernity. This period is one characterized by shifting social norms that largely parallel different economic situations within the broader society. Economic and social conditions in the United States have brought with them a particular set of realities that in turn had an impact on constructions of images of The Other and policies related to such perceptions. Questions of social welfare, coupled with questions of social cleavages between groups, framed many of the issues of the era. Chapter 11 explores The Other within the context of shifting welfare state policies. Specifically, I review how depictions of the recipients of welfare services have been altered and how such alterations have affected the types of services provided. I also look at depictions of The Other during the welfare reform policy discussions of the 1980s and 1990s. Whereas in the early part of the twentieth century a discourse on issues of social welfare helped to frame the safety net as we had come to experience it within the United States, conversations on the safety net changed by the late twentieth century. Chapter 12 examines questions of the policy discourse on The Other that have surfaced in relation to the U.S. Census. As the vehicle through which the U.S. population is counted every ten years, the Census has given rise to a number of policy questions ever since the process began in 1790. My exploration of the Census focuses on two issues that have emerged since the middle of the twentieth century: first, the issue of the Census undercount—particularly the undercounting of specific populations in the United States—and second, matters pertaining to the classification of group identities within the Census. Particularly in the years following the 2000 Census, debates on multiracial classifications drew into the open a series of discussions related to the classification of The Other in policy discourse. In chapter 13, the second chapter examining the immigrant as The Other, I explore immigration debates in the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, which has been marked by both the liberalization and retraction of policies related to immigration. Activities beginning in the spring of 2006 and debates related to immigration from Mexico serve as the focal point for much of the work in this chapter. Interestingly, many of the arguments related to such policies are similar to many of the explorations in earlier depictions of the immigrant Other. Here, as in the early 1900s, we learn of the construction of the image of the immigrant Other as bringing numerous social ailments to the broader society, and the political and administrative responses to addressing the issue are similar.

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The conclusion revisits questions concerning the processes of how The Other is depicted and the affect of that depiction on public policymakers. I ground this examination in two final areas in which questions of The Other have surfaced in policy discourse: survivors of Katrina as The Other, and post9/11 images of the Middle Eastern immigrant as The Other. Much of this final chapter explores questions in the larger conceptualization of humanism, the implementation of political goals, and the increasingly diverse contexts in which administrative processes are framed. It is here that I explore in detail potential responses as we reflect upon actions within the administrative state.

My Hope I have written Administration and The Other largely out of a spirit of concern. The conversations I hear as I walk down the street or ride the train are often conversations based on duality and not multiplicity—an “us versus them” framework. Media depictions, sadly, appear to do little to shape the realities of complexity further. Simplistic duality has little place in a world of increasing complexity—particularly when much of that complexity results from the interaction of numerous people of varied experiences and worldviews. The public servant of the future will have to work with an increasingly diverse population in mind and with a better understanding of his or her own processes of constructing images of The Other as someone influenced by his or her actions. Much of this task will require continued reflection on the universal and varied experiences of being human. My hope, then, is that readers of Administration and The Other, whether students or practitioners within political and administrative arenas, might challenge themselves as they design and implement policies to engage those who we might otherwise marginalize. It is the task of those involved in building and sustaining society’s institutions to ensure— particularly in light of the many degrees of connectivity between people—that we balance our uniqueness and our similarities and ensure a greater appreciation of The Other and, as a result, of ourselves.

Notes 1. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk. (New York: New American Library, 1995), 41. 2. Francis Collins and Monique K. Mansoura. The Human Genome Project: Revealing the Shared Inheritance of All Humankind. Cancer, 91 (2001): 221–25, 222.

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3. Howard Schuman et al., Racial Attitudes in America: Trends and Interpretation. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 4. Anthony G. Greenwald et al., Measuring Individual Differences in Implicit Cognition: The Implicit Association Test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74 (1998): 1464–80. 5. Claudia Dean and Darryl Fears, Negative Perception of Islam Increasing. Washington Post, March 9, 2006, A1. 6. Stephanie G. Wolf, Urban Village: Population, Community, and Family Structure in Germantown, Pennsylvania, 1683–1800. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 138–39.

1 Theoretical Foundations

T IS VERY DIFFICULT TO KNOW PEOPLE and I don’t think one can ever really know any but one’s own countrymen,” wrote W. Somerset Maugham in the introduction to his book The Razor’s Edge. His cautionary note stemmed from apprehensions that he as an Englishman had in writing about the lives of Americans. “For men and women are not only themselves,” he observed,

“I

they are also the region in which they were born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learned to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives’ tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things you can’t come to know by hearsay, you can only know them if you have lived them. You can only know them if you are them.1

Maugham’s challenge, one of representation, is shared by everyone involved in observing, learning from, and trying to make sense of the lives of others. Individuals who are engaged in analyzing, designing, implementing, and administering policy find themselves confronting a similar challenge of understanding. Instead of their subject being a character in a novel, their subject is the person or group for whom policies are being designed, implemented, and evaluated. To be effective, the policy administrator should understand the complexity of the realities faced by the members of the public with whom he or she is concerned. This challenge is one that has proven to be elusive and one that for a number of reasons policymakers have in some cases simply chosen to avoid. To —1—

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seek understanding implies that one is willing to assume the responsibility for obtaining a further degree of awareness. In understanding The Other, this implies assuming a level of comprehension—and ideally action—followed by further understanding of the social, political, and economic situations facing The Other, and by extension the social, political, and economic situations facing oneself. My purpose in this chapter is to establish a theoretical context for beginning to explore the knowing process that Maugham noted, but with an emphasis on individuals engaged in developing and implementing policy related to The Other. My approach is grounded in an integration of three frameworks of knowledge conceptualization: the archeology of knowledge, the positionality of knowledge, and the sociology of knowledge. It is through these frameworks that I construct an epistemological basis for exploring many of the questions pertaining to how policymakers conceptualize The Other in political and administrative contexts.

The Archeology of Knowledge The concept of the archeology of knowledge draws upon the French historical philosopher Michel Foucault’s examinations of power. According to Foucault, power provides one with a position of creating the direction of a particular discourse as it enables one to both define and limit the scope of definitions within that discourse. Two pieces of work by Foucault provide a point of departure in an exploration of the creation of The Other. The first, Madness and Civilization (2001), is a study of the creation of Otherness during the classical era in Europe. Specifically, in this work, Foucault explores the development of the concept of madness during this period. Foucault notes that, for much of European history, the leper was a significant Other in society. Throughout the continent, there were hundreds of leprosaria, where lepers were isolated from the rest of society. As a means of segregating lepers from the rest of society, the leprosarium became the means of institutionalizing a process of constructing The Other. In the early 1600s, leprosy began to vanish from many Western societies, and for numerous years, the former leprosaria were unused. In 1657, however, that changed. Beginning with the founding of the Hôpital Général in France, Foucault observes that “poor vagabonds, criminals and ‘deranged minds’ would take the part played by the leper” and created processes of exclusion and a condition of institutionalization related to these new external groups.2 In an introduction to a later version of Madness and Civilization, Cooper (2001) observes that part of Foucault’s attempt is to argue that madness is largely

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a disease constructed by our civilization.“We choose,” he observes,“to conjure up this disease in order to evade a certain moment of our own existence—the moment of disturbance, of penetrating vision into the depths of ourselves, which we prefer to externalize into others.”3 Thus Foucault might ask, as we wrestle with questions of how we may or may not be considering notions of The Other, are we not in actuality wrestling with notions of ourselves? If Foucault’s Policymakers is an exploration of the creation of The Other, then his The Order of Things (1970) is an exploration of the processes through which scientific representations are created in a quest for a notion of The Same. Foucault’s task here is to use an in-depth exploration of the Classical era and the processes of scientific categorization that emerged from it to further understand the appearance of a series of representations that followed in several key sciences. Scientific discourse, according to Foucault, is a process for shaping perceptions of sameness. As a result, it is as important to study the discursive process as it is to understand what is being said or discovered. As Foucault notes, “I tried to explore scientific discourse not from the point of view of the formal structures of what they are saying, but from the point of view of the rules that come into play in the very existence of such discourse.”4 Thus, in The Order of Things, Foucault frames a context for understanding the various cultural codes, particularly those concerned about language, perception, and hierarchy of practices that enable the processes of perceiving, grouping, exchanging, and engaging or enforcing processes of categorization. For Foucault, such a process entails not only engaging in a study of the process of categorization, it also entails engaging in a study of how language itself—with its grammatical and philological elements—relates to the construction of categories and resultant meaning. As Foucault notes in his own comparison of Madness and Civilization and The Order of Things, Whereas in the history of madness I was investigating the way in which a culture can determine in a massive, general form the difference that limits it, I am concerned here with observing how a culture experiences the propinquity of things, how it establishes the tabula of their relationships and the order by which they must be considered. I am concerned, in short, with a history of resemblance.5

In engaging Foucault’s work as we explore notions of The Other, several limitations need to be taken into account. Exploring each of these limitations provides us with foundations for further comprehending some of the questions that might help us to better understand the contexts for The Other. First is that much of Foucault’s focus is on the classical period. This was a time when, through reformulations of scientific processes and foundations of knowing established by Descartes, processes of inquiry were in a stage of major transformation. Using this era as a foundation for thinking about the

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modern era, or perhaps even a late-modern era, provides us with the framework for further explorations on the foundations for understanding how we know what we know. It provides a point of departure for asking key questions related to the genesis and evolutionary processes of inquiry—particularly in relation to The Other as an object of such inquiry. The second is the Western context that frames his writings. One of the constant complexities that we face is a merging of various perspectives from the Western and Eastern contexts. How, for example, do notions of madness, if they exist, surface in other societies? As patterns of globalization become further intertwined in the foundations of our interactions in political and administrative contexts, how do patterns and processes of categorization— evolving from European scientific foundations—develop as the discourse between people engages language and perspective once overlooked from a Western context? The third is a question of where Foucault’s writings fall within a structural framework. As he noted in the English translation of The Order of Things, Foucault did not consider himself a structuralist, although many people have attempted to categorize him as such. His rejection of this title positioned him to use post-structural frameworks in the analysis of the questions about the foundations of knowledge. Modern-era challenges have included wrestling with issues related to various groups and determining how to define and integrate the various groups in society. Diversity has increasingly found itself in the midst of modern-era concerns, particularly as various groups have explored questions of how to manage interactions and place them in a larger context. Today, that diversity often manifests itself in an East-West tension—a notion that Said explored at length in his work on the shaping of notions of Orientalism (a concept which by Said’s own account has been duly influenced by the work of Foucault). That diversity has also been found, for much of the history of racial issues in the United States, as a black-white tension—until the late twentieth century. Finally, it is also found in an us-and-them duality that is easy to frame in a structural context. The limitation established by Foucault’s rejection of the structuralist label then provides us an outlet for reflection on representation and categorization while working in a situation of acknowledged complexity and multiple group identity.

The Positionality of Knowledge We turn now to a concept of positionality explored in-depth by Edward Said (1979). According to Said, positionality draws upon the role that elevated sta-

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tus might play in shaping views about particular groups. Positionality relates to power, for it enables one to shape perspectives of Truth within a society. In Said’s examination of the creation and sustaining of a concept of the Orient, it was the positionality of European (and later American) powers that were able to create a concept of the Middle East and its scores of different cultures and groups of people. As Said observes, The imaginative examination of things Oriental was based more or less exclusively upon a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality an Oriental world emerged, first according to general ideas about who or what was an Oriental, then according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections.6

Although a number of dynamic social and political processes are involved with the shaping of our constructed realities, certain groups of individuals tend to have a significant role in framing our discourse related to The Other. Two sets of these individuals, and their positional role in shaping the foundation of knowledge from a positional framework, are the expert and the intellectual. The expert has had a rapidly changing role through various stages of modernity. In a premodern era, the expert frequently had a monopoly upon what was perceived as Truth within a society. Expertise, drawn from a position in a society—often one with a religious foundation—established the grounding of Truth in whatever the expert had to contribute to the discourse. As a representation of the church or the speaker of religious doctrine, the Truth proposed by the religiously grounded expert was often seen as unyielding. With the rise of science and its various subdisciplines, and with our movement through the age of enlightenment, came a framework for thinking about the truth, and indeed much of what has framed the modern era has been the formulation of concepts of truth based on notions of science. More recently, during a period of late modernity, the role of definer of the Truth is open for exploration. As societies become increasingly legalistic in their approaches to mediating the interactions of individuals, and as the outlets for communication and the distribution of knowledge become more varied, our foundation for shaping Truth becomes less stable. Whereas in premodern settings this expert was positioned by his or her role in the church or the predominant religious institution as the definer of Truth, in modern eras, it was the expert whose knowledge derived from his or her exploration and knowledge of the sciences. In an era of late modernity, Truth is determined largely as a matter of positioning the expert through frequently intertwined political, legal, and financial means.

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These intertwined political, legal, and financial means enable positionality, and such positionality ultimately determines how much truth is defined by science, faith, or dogmatism of one form or another. The second individual who has a role in shaping the stock of knowledge from which we operate is the intellectual. As Said (1994) later observes, the intellectual is one who operates in direct opposition to the expert. Instead of providing information, the intellectual’s role is to facilitate the questioning of notions of Truth as they might be presented to us. The intellectual is closely related but not identical to the notion of Truth developer in a society. In fact, the role of the true intellectual, Said argued, is best defined in a potential challenger to notions of Truth. On one hand is the perception of the intellectual as the expert—or the person who defines what Truth is for a society; on the other hand is the challenger of status within a society. Thus, for the purposes of our examination of The Other, Said’s work enables us to explore several frameworks. First, we examine the role that positionality plays in enabling the creation of a conceptualization of The Other and resulting policies. Second, we explore the role of the expert in further shaping a notion of The Other and, to a degree, the question of how the expert has attained his or her positionality for shaping the truth, particularly as related to The Other. Finally, we explore concepts of the intellectual in facilitating the questioning processes that call into question the concepts of Truth, particularly as pertaining to the characteristics and roles of The Other in a societal context shaped within a political and administrative framework.

The Sociology of Knowledge The emergence of the sociology of knowledge, which is the third foundation upon which Administration and The Other is based, was a direct reaction to tensions in the natural and social sciences in the 1800s on the ways of knowing. For several years in the late 1800s, positivist traditions, driven largely by methodological advances in the natural sciences, began to surpass traditions grounded in metaphysical idealism as routes for understanding the social world. For some scholars, particularly those grounded in approaches of idealism and historicism, these new positivist traditions needed to be challenged. One scholar willing to criticize the increasingly popular positivists’ traditions was the German philosopher Edmund Husserl. According to Husserl, positivist-grounded sciences had lost the ability to critically reflect on their frameworks for analysis. Husserl argued that the sciences needed to return to their Cartesian roots of raising doubts around the core foundations of positivism. It was upon such doubt that the sociology of knowledge emerged as a

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reaction to the positivistic leanings that were shaping the evolution of many social sciences throughout the twentieth century. In the 1920s, German philosopher Max Scheler echoed much of Husserl’s critique of positivism and called for critical reflection on processes that had become ingrained in the positivistic sciences. In the three centuries since Descartes provided a basic understanding of scientific processes, Scheler argued, many of these processes had lost their own foundations. His work was among the first in the field of sociology to argue against the growing trend in sociology and other disciplines toward adopting more positivistic approaches for making sense of their phenomena under study. In 1936, Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia introduced the concept of the sociology of knowledge to an English-speaking audience, and as a result, to a much wider community than had encountered Scheler’s work. One of the critical elements of the sociology of knowledge that Mannheim introduced was the socially embedded nature through which knowledge is constructed. According to Mannheim, knowledge creation and development is not an individual process. Instead, it is a process through which many individuals participate or have participated. According to Mannheim, “Strictly speaking it is incorrect to say that the single individual thinks. Rather it is more correct to insist that he participates in thinking further what other men have thought before him.”7 Our thought patterns, Mannheim noted, are inherited from the society in which we are situated. Our group identities, Mannheim argued, have intertwined their roles and a collective unconscious to a degree that affects various processes, such as the collectivities or groups to which we belong and how our realities are shaped. Our group membership and group identity frame the realities of which we are a part and to which we subscribe. His observations on this are not too dissimilar from Maugham’s observations that began this chapter. As Mannheim notes, We belong to a group not only because we are born into it, not merely because we profess to belong to it, nor finally because we give it our loyalty and allegiance, but primarily because we see the world and certain things in the world the way it does (i.e. in terms of the meaning of the group in question).8

In the 1930s, Alfred Schutz undertook an in-depth analysis of Max Weber’s work in an attempt to develop a basis for using phenomenology to examine the social sciences. In his Phenomenology and the Social World (1967), Schutz explored the tensions that surface between the methodological and philosophical approaches that had begun to undergird the field of sociology. For him, the issue of interpretation of the social world was key in this emergent area. The means through which this social world was constructed had meaning for those

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living in it as well as those engaged in scientifically interpreting it. According to Schutz, Living in the world, we live with others and for others, orienting our lives to them. In experiencing them as others, as contemporaries and fellow creatures, as predecessors and successors, by joining with them in common activity and work, influencing them and being influenced by them in turn—in doing all these things we understand the behavior of others and assume that they understand ours. In these acts of establishing or interpreting meanings there is built up for us in varying degrees of anonymity, in greater or lesser intimacy of experience, in manifold intersecting perspectives, the structural meaning of the social world, which is as much our world (strictly speaking, my world) as the world of the others.9

Several of Schutz’s students became engaged in work on the sociology of knowledge and had an impact on the development of the field in their own ways. One student, Thomas Luckmann, aided in the completion of Schutz’s The Structures of the Life-World (1974) following Schutz’s death in 1959. In this publication, Schutz and Luckmann provided an in-depth introduction to the notion of the lifeworld, which is the reality in which we find ourselves continuously situated and whose existence we frequently take for granted. In 1966, Luckmann and coauthor Peter Berger published The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, which built upon much of the work of previous social constructivists and raised questions about stages of socialization as means of shaping and socially reifying institutions. Their work served as a framework for raising key foundations within the notion of the sociology of knowledge. Berger and Luckmann’s work also had the role of widening the audience of participants who were familiar with the concept and utility of the notion of the sociology of knowledge. Key Themes The intersection of the archeology of knowledge, the sociology of knowledge, and the positionality of knowledge provides the foundation for our discussion of the construction of The Other and the resultant effect upon political and administrative processes. Specifically, five themes drawn from the intersection of these three areas help to shape the discussion of The Other in a political and administrative context. Reality of Everyday Life A central concern that surfaces in much of the literature on the sociology of knowledge, particularly in the work of Berger and Luckmann, is related to

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a notion of the reality of everyday life. Constrained largely by the now of the present moment and the here of the current situation, the reality of everyday life helps to keep a focus on much of the immediacy that surrounds us. This reality is one that is intersubjective; others have a role in shaping it and others share it with us. Other individuals also, however, have their own reality, which in turn is influenced by their interactions with others and the further development of their own situations. The most important direct interaction within the context of the reality of everyday life is face-to-face interaction. This direct interaction is the only situation in which the other individual becomes real within our world. At all other times, according to this framework, other individuals are abstractions comprised of recollections and constructions of images of the individual other. One of our central concerns as we reflect on the role of The Other is how, in the context of our everyday lives, we conceptualize images of who The Other is. What shapes our understanding of the reality of everyday life? What are some of the links between the reality of everyday life and our actions? How does a policymaker, framing and implementing policies that pertain to Others, contextualize them within their everyday lives? Do the processes for building a context for Others hinder or help in the development of policy approaches? Lifeworld The concept of the lifeworld provides us with our next area of emphasis in exploring notions of The Other. There are certain characteristics and assumptions related to the lifeworld that help to build our understanding and exploration of it. First, it is intersubjective—other people are a part of it. Each of these people has or her own consciousness. We are able to enter into relationships with these and other people, communicate with them, and build a comprehension of Others within that lifeworld. Much of one’s understanding of the lifeworld is based on one’s previous experiences or is based on knowledge about similar experiences passed onto him or her by someone else. This previous knowledge is referred to as our stock of knowledge, and it is something that surfaces with every interaction with another. As Schutz and Luckmann note, “To every concrete situation in which I meet an Other, I bring with me my stock of knowledge.”10 In the context of our own discourse on the role of the administrator or political actor is the importance of knowing that action occurs within a particular lifeworld that he or she creates in the context of his or her own immediate experiences interacting with others. The people with whom the

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policymaker might shape policies at a given moment, the constituencies with whom he or she might interact—all are engaged in the creation of a lifeworld that might be shared at a specific time or place. Typification Schemes How types are created and maintained within a general consciousness is another area within the sociology of knowledge and the archeology of knowledge that is critical for an examination of a framing of The Other within a political and administrative discourse. As Berger and Luckmann note, the reality of everyday life contains typification schemes in terms of which others are apprehended and “dealt with” in face-to-face encounters. It is important to note that at the same time as we are building typifications schemes that shape how we view others, they too are developing typification schemes that affect how they view us. As people move further from direct interaction with one another, the means through which we build such typifications becomes increasingly anonymous. How we define a group in written and verbal methods provides a framework for how we envision and construct such groups. Analyses of how typifications of groups, particularly groups directly impacted by the policy process, are framed by individuals shaping the policy process are central to The Other. As we will explore in chapters 7 and 13, typification schemes framed around the immigrant during several stages of U.S. history have influenced discourse and ultimately policy related to the immigrant. Much of this imagery has painted an image of the immigrant as someone who drains taxpayer resources or brings a number of social ills. Or, as will be explored in chapter 6, typifications of the African American provided a foundation for inactivity on a number of social challenges. Institutionalization Institutions provide the framework for all of our interactions within a societal context. From our family lives to our experiences in work and school, we are continuously surrounded by or find ourselves engaged in institutions. As a result, institutions contribute greatly to our various conceptualizations of and in the lifeworld. Institutions are social constructions. The governments under which we live, the organizations for which we work, and the patterns of our family lives are all products of institutional frameworks to which we give meaning. Thus, as we think about the development of institutions, we must consider the assumptions of those individuals and groups who might be involved in the initial development of institutions. What were their perceptions

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in shaping the institution, particularly in relation to The Other? More importantly, as we find ourselves in roles in which we shape institutions, we may find ourselves structuring such institutions so they can better provide means for conceptualizing The Other and the experiences he or she may face daily. They are the realms through which our notions of the lifeworld are shaped. The development of the Hôpital Générale in France was a direct reaction to a framing of The Other. It was the development of a key institution of and for The Other. All of these institutions have had at one point in time a set of creators who established the initial guiding roles prescribed by them. In many cases, they have also had a set of founding documents that help to establish or frame the perspectives of the institutions. Thus, it is to many of these documents that we turn as we obtain both perspectives of these creators of such institutions and their application of their own perceptions of reality on the institutions they aim to develop. The case of the “institution” of the United States provides an example. The framers of the Constitution had a specific set of ideals that they held about who should be included and who should be excluded from the polity of the society they were building. Thus, the initial documents that they established framed African Americans as representing only three-fifths of a human and Native Americans as not part of the larger nation. Thus, their framework shaped a notion of The Other that determined who would participate in institutionalized discourse and who would be excluded from that discourse. Stages of Socialization An individual in any society undergoes a process through which he or she is socialized into that society. As Berger and Luckmann note, the individual is “not born a member of a society. He is born with a predisposition toward sociality, and he becomes a member of society.”11 The process in which individuals shaping political and administrative processes undergo their stages of socialization is an area of concern, particularly in conceptualizations of the lifeworld. The initial process through which one becomes a member of society is known as primary socialization.12 This is the most important stage of socialization an individual undergoes in a society. Because we are born into a society, important others—whether parents or guardians—are responsible for shaping our initial socialization, and as a result they help to construct vital components of our initial worldview. As we grow older and find ourselves in new social and professional environments, we undergo stages of secondary

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socialization. These too affect our perspective and understanding of the larger world of which each of us is a part. These stages are important to understand from the perspective that the administration or political actor establishing the institutional norms—or the discourse within a society—is influenced by them. A policymaker from an upper-class background, for example, most likely experienced a stage of primary socialization that constructed his or her initial worldview within the framework of such a perspective. A policymaker from any other background would also have had his or her initial perspective shaped by his or her own unique worldview. As both policymakers enter into the specific institutional framework for the development and shaping of policy, they encounter specific institutional perspectives and frameworks that comprise a common secondary socialization phase and ultimately a commonality of perspective in comprehending The Other.

Conclusions Our task as students, scholars, and practitioners of political and administrative processes is to recognize Maugham’s challenge of representation, to incorporate reflection in our processes of constructing The Other, and to continually revisit strategies for shaping, administering, and evaluating our policies particularly as related to groups of Others. The intersection of the archeology, positionality, and sociology of knowledge provides a beginning point for exploring conceptualization of Others, and how policy development in relation to them has evolved. Understanding the constructive processes that have developed through the evolution of our political and administrative history as a nation provides a context for understanding to the role of policy development and implementation in relation to Others. Thus, as we reflect on various stages of our nation’s history in the following chapters, our framing perspectives, drawn from the intersection of the sociology, archeology, and positionality of knowledge, provide historical frameworks on policymakers’ notions of The Other and the resultant impact upon the political and administrative state.

Notes 1. W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge. (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 8. 2. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. (New York: Routledge, 2001), 5.

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3. David Cooper, Introduction, in Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. (New York: Routledge, 2001), viii. 4. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. (London: Routledge, 2001), xiv. 5. Ibid., xxiv. 6. Edward Said, Orientalism. (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 9. 7. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1953), 3. 8. Ibid., 19. 9. Alfred Schutz, On Phenomenology and Social Relations. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 336. 10. Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of the Life-World. (London: Heinemann, 1974), 66. 11. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1966), 129. 12. Ibid., 129.

I THE EARLY REPUBLIC

2 The Expert in a Period of American Enlightenment

HE BANKS OF THE HUDSON RIVER IN WEEHAWKEN, NEW JERSEY, became etched into history on the morning of July 11, 1804. There, Alexander Hamilton, former secretary of the treasury, signer of the Constitution, and proponent of a Federalist perspective of governance for the nascent American Republic, briefly faced Aaron Burr, the sitting vice president of the United States, for a duel. Both had wrestled through years of an ongoing political rivalry, which over time had grown in intensity. A few months before the meeting in Weehawken, the rivalry began to escalate in a series of events that would bring both men to their meeting that day. In April of that year, a letter published in the Albany Register accused Hamilton of having made defamatory comments about Burr during a political dinner. Burr in turn questioned whether such comments had been made. Not having received a response that met his satisfaction, Burr challenged Hamilton to the meeting that would take Hamilton’s life. By the afternoon of July 12, the differences between the two men had been settled. Hamilton lay dead, and Burr, the victor in the duel, would find himself disgraced for having killed a man whom, despite his differences, many people viewed as a patriot. Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr were products of the American era of enlightenment; as such, their means of settling a disagreement—despite its mortal results—was perceived in many circles as a dignified way of resolving a conflict. To have settled their differences in any other way would have placed them in another, perhaps more pedestrian, category of individual. In their attempts to position themselves as the embodiment of true gentlemen, enlightened men did

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not settle their disagreements through a brawl; civilized debate and, in extreme cases, approaches such as dueling were their devices. Contrast Hamilton and Burr with Thomas Paine, a man who was not of their professional class and who shaped perspectives several years before the meeting in Weehawken. Born in Britain and into a lower class ranking than the colonial elite, Paine was very much the antithesis of the group in which Hamilton and Burr positioned themselves. He was an embodiment of their class-defined Other; however, the distinction between Paine and the “enlightened men” went much further than merely a difference of class. It also typified the tension between the experts and the intellectuals of this era, and the role of both in constructing a society. The juxtaposition of the more common perspective versus that of an individual who saw him- or herself as one of the enlightened members of the colonies, largely represents the dynamics related to the early evolution of The Other in American society—a notion that will be explored in this chapter. My examination of the dynamics related to the development of a concept of The Other begins with an examination of the concept of the expert and the intellectual in an era of American enlightenment. This American notion of the enlightenment was a unique side of a discourse among European and American thinkers of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on notions of progress, rationality in society, and liberalism. The American exploration of this notion, framed largely in these early years of the shaping of institutions of governance, and declaration of societal norms and goals, served as a unique interplay with various notions of evolving images and perceptions of statehood.

Experts and Intellectuals in an Era of American Enlightenment The mid-eighteenth century saw the emergence of a period of American enlightenment, when increasingly groups of men attempted to create within themselves an emergent class of social monitors and social reformers. The American concept of enlightenment was shaped by two factors that ultimately framed the identity questions related to the discourse on The Other. First were some of the general issues that the enlightenment sought to address— liberalism in governance, progress, and concepts of rationality. The second was the general impact of European notions of enlightenment on the psyche of many of those positioned to shape the various institutions of American society. The American story until that time had been one of colonies that were extremely diverse in their makeup and belief. The tidal areas of Virginia were quite different from the puritanical settlements of New England. These regions in turn were quite different from the replicated feudal arrangements of

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the Carolinas. At times, some threads of commonality surfaced—the widespread impact of George Whitefield’s Great Awakening and late seventeenthand early eighteenth-century revivalism, for example, unified many of the people in a common vision of the role of religion in society. As a result, there was a question of the blending of a post-revivalism with notions of enlightenment. The other unique question in relation to American society related to the number of people who, had the background, of intellectual thinkers in Europe, and the number of people who, while not having such a background, desired one. As a result, American society during this era experienced a rapid emergence of civic and social institutions that many people believed would demonstrate the existence of a learned society. Libraries, concert halls, museums, and other cultural institutions that helped to frame an image of an intellectually curious elite emerged in various communities. A core demonstration of civility during the early years of the nineteenth century was one’s level of politeness or gentlemanly nature. The ability to engage in rational discourse, the demonstration of virtuosity in one’s actions, and a lack of bias in perspective were all core elements of the idea of what it took for one’s gentlemanly nature to evolve. Disinterest—specifically the ability to surmount one’s personal interests—was a critical defining characteristic of an enlightened man. The wealth of the enlightened, of course, enabled them to set aside any personal gain in declaring the need for independence and the development of a new nation. As representatives of the Federalist and Anti-Federalist elite, and as individuals who would have considered themselves part of that disinterested group, Hamilton and Burr were part of a class that controlled the development of the institutions of the young American society. Their roles as members of this class gave them the credibility as specialists, or experts, to be invited to participate in the drafting of the founding and institutionalization of documents of the era. Comments by some of the wealthier members of the Revolutionary era about the inability of the masses to truly engage in handling their own affairs illustrate some of the class perceptions held by members of this group of disinterested experts, of the “interested” communities. In the pre-Revolutionary days, George Washington had referred to small land-holding farmers as the “grazing multitude,” lawyer John Adams had spoken of working people as “the common Herd of Mankind,” and New York attorney and businessman Gouverneur Morris had described them as “poor reptiles.”1 By contrast, Thomas Paine found himself allied with the interests of the Common Man. His marginality helped him articulate American criticism of the activities of the “Men of Reason” in the United States. A critical factor in Paine’s work and in his character stemmed from his position at the margins

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of both British and American society—a position that enabled him to articulate many of the perspectives of people in America during the period of independence. Paine’s life began in a family that had been marginalized within British society. His father had been expelled from The Society of Friends for marrying a member of the Anglican Church, and Paine found himself between the two communities of faith while growing up. Paine’s father removed him from school after only five years of formal education and put him to work as an apprentice in his business. In time, the business was not able to support Paine and his father, and Paine was forced to leave it. Much of Paine’s life in his twenties was met with failure and disappointment. His first wife and child died in childbirth; his second marriage ended in divorce. In 1774, at the age of thirty-seven, Paine left England for the colonies. Shortly following his arrival in Philadelphia in the mid 1770s, Paine found himself quickly observing the class differences and mechanisms for exclusion from political, civic, and economic processes in the emergent nation. Women, blacks, indentured servants, and lower classes in the colonies were subject to class differentiation. In colonial assemblies, ruling elites were of a more privileged status than others, a point of which Paine was aware and to which he attempted to draw attention in his writings. Despite his marginal position in the enlightened social circles of late eighteenth-century America, Paine was able to articulate and galvanize the perspectives of many people living in the colonies at the time. His Common Sense, which appeared in January of 1776, was the instrument of much of this mobilization, because it helped to direct the opinions of thousands of people within the colonial establishment to rally behind the cause of independence. It proposed a system under which free people would govern themselves and proposed systems of liberty and equality that helped serve as a rallying cry for many of the common people who would help to build the support of the revolutionary processes. While nearly six months passed between the publishing of the first edition of Common Sense and the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the power of Common Sense helped enable people to see beyond the need to argue for the authority of Parliament, the continuance of a colonial relationship, and their roles as British subjects; Common Sense helped people to articulate a vision of their own nationhood. Common Sense spoke directly to Burr and Hamilton’s Other. It was a document drafted largely in the language of the common person and that articulated grievances with the King. The populism of Paine’s language was far different from the elite tones of Publius or even Jefferson and far more cutting in its attacks on the crown and its articulation of an ideal form of government for the new Republic. Paine’s most closely allied interest group consisted not

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of the elite, land-owning classes who shaped the constitutional framework but of those who were at the economic margins.

Emergent Class Tensions Class tensions became integrated into post-Revolutionary discourse on challenges of institution building. One of the initial legacies of the Revolutionary War was a great deal of debt for the new confederation of the 1780s. Lack of a coherent system of taxation framed by an elected elite meant that many of the poorer farmers of the confederation— many of whom were also veterans of the Revolutionary War—were also those who carried the largest share of the tax burdens. In 1786, Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays formed a small armed militia to shut down various debtor courts that had appeared throughout Massachusetts. In the rebellion that Shays led, several poor, debt-ridden farmers, many of whom were veterans of the war confronted an army organized by Massachusetts Governor Bowdoin and financed by some of the wealthy merchants and financiers of Boston; the conflict reflected some of the class divisions that had begun to surface. In addition to orchestrating an instance of direct class conflict, Shay’s Rebellion led many individuals within the elite groups to question the stability of the nation under the Articles of Confederation and the realities of an equal status between men as suggested in the earliest of the framing documents. These questions of stability and equality in ability and role spurred conversations that led to serious questions about whether the Articles of Confederation could serve as a stabilizing institutional document. One key figure concerned about the role of the Articles of Confederation was James Madison. Madison saw the Articles of Confederation as too weak and had several concerns that the legislatures had too many “interested” people versus disinterested people within them. The division between those who referred to themselves as being among the disinterested men and those they deemed as having interests helped to frame core images of The Other. Madison noted these interests in Federalist 10 by observing that farmers and merchants were engaged in the marketplace and had specific interests to promote. They were part of the “interested group.” This was not the case, however, he argued with members of the learned elite who he argued had no distinct interests, and as a result were the individuals that were best suited to be political leaders. Madison’s argument that people with limited interests were the best positioned to be involved with governance coincided with his view that directly

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elected officials were too reflective of the passions of the people who elected them. By 1786, he had become convinced that Shay’s Rebellion and the other crises of the 1780s stemmed from popular engagement in politics as much as from a weak confederation. Madison’s concerns drove him to advocate for the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 as a means of developing government that was both centralized and under the control of disinterested parties. His concerns also helped him to better articulate his justification of limited involvement of “interested” groups through his contributions to The Federalist Papers. In Federalist 10, Madison provided the clearest articulation of his concerns about the emergence of factions in government. He attributed the failure of many governments to the development of factions, which he defined as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregated interests of the community.”2 Madison outlined two methods of curing factions: first, destroying the liberty “which is essential to its interests,” and second, giving every citizen the same passions and interests. The primary source of faction, he argues, “has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold, and those who are without property, have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination.”3 Madison believed there was a clear distinction between various groups of people, and it was this distinction that helped to shape his perspective of The Other. “The diversity in the faculties of men from which the rights of property originate,” was in his opinion the key point differentiating people. “The protection of these faculties,” he argued, “is the first object of government.”4 Like Madison, John Jay also framed a perspective on who should be included in perspectives of nationhood as articulated in the Federalist Papers, and thus influenced these conceptualizations of The Other. Writing as Publius in Federalist 2, Jay proposed a notion of identity that suggested Americans as consisting of “a provincially guided band of brethren . . . descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.”5 The differences of class, as they existed in the early years of the United States and were defined by men such as Madison and Jay, shaped much of the discourse that ultimately framed many of our nation’s early institutionalizing

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documents. These institutions engineered the images of who would be included in the discursive processes for framing the structures and processes of governance. Many individuals were included in the vital conversations at the time, and much of their selection for inclusion in the discourse was based on similarity. To have a voice in the conversations related to the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Bill of Rights—all of which can be categorized as the founding documents of the Republic— required a degree of sameness that in turn framed a notion of The Other.

Conclusions The founding years of the American Republic were largely consumed by three tasks: the framing of the processes and documents of independence themselves, the framing of the institutions related to government, and the development of initial concepts of American identity. Each of these tasks affected the framing of notions of The Other. The societal experts and intellectuals influenced the discourse on these tasks. The experts, positioned by their roles as “men of reason,” were able to define the institutions that have shaped American society since that era. The positionality of the experts was able to facilitate their definition of American identity as articulated in the writings of Jay. Their positionality also enabled them to frame the official concepts of who would and would not be included in the early American polity. Their discussions helped to build consensus around the framing of The Declaration of Independence, The Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution itself and shaped who would be included and excluded in American notions of identity. The intellectuals, exemplified by Thomas Paine, were able to facilitate critical reflection by the common man on the emergent norms of the society. Later intellectuals were able to challenge the notions of inclusion within the realm of American identity and the span of the evolving political and administrative state. The interactions between the two impacted, as we shall explore, notions of The Other within an administrative and political context during much of the history of our nation.

Notes 1. Harvey Kaye, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), 31.

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2. James Madison, The Federalist no. 10, The Federalist Papers. (New York: Signet Classic, 2003 [1787]), 46. 3. Ibid., 47, 52. 4. Ibid., 35. 5. John Jay, The Federalist no. 2, The Federalist Papers. (New York: Signet Classic, 2003 [1787]).

3 Slavery

HEN JOHN

ROLFE, SECRETARY OF THE VIRGINIA COLONY, noted in his journal in 1619, “about the last of August, there came to Virginia a Dutchman of Warre that sold us twenty Negers,” he did not realize that his entry would become the first recorded arrival of blacks into the British colonies.1 Nor did he realize that the arrival of the early Africans would set into motion a multi-century debate on the evolution of a system of slavery that paralleled most of the colonial era and the first eighty decades of the new republic. Limited historical records suggest that the initial experiences of the twenty arrivals were not too dissimilar from the experiences of many of the indentured servants that arrived from Europe. The colonies at the time lacked a specific legal code for a system of slavery. In time however, the colonies did develop specific codes that differentiated groups of indentured servants and formed a system of slavery that would place a moral stain on the emergent nation’s history. The development and institutionalization of a system of slavery signified one of the key transitions to a state of Otherness within American society, one that changed a group of people to a codified status as property. An understanding of this process of transformation from person to property requires an examination of the elements that underlie much of the framing of this concept of slavery in the United States. How did the notion of the slave evolve within the larger status of the society? How did the constructed process shape the evolution of the emergent system? What were the roles of political, administrative, and judicial decision-makers in enabling the process

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to occur? What were the societal conditions that enabled such thinking to emerge? Although the conditions facing slaves in the colonial era and in the early years of the Republic varied depending on region, local economy, and cultural norms, there were commonalties that helped frame conceptualizations within and between communities that shaped a legally codified form of Otherness for the slave in the nascent American society. This chapter examines the development of notions of Otherness in relation to the development of a system of slavery in early American society. I begin with an examination of various conceptualizations of difference that enabled a system of slavery to evolve in the colonial era in what was to become the United States. Here, I specifically examine some of the theological and pseudoscientific perspectives that framed the notion of the slave as The Other. I continue with an examination of colonial variations in the evolution of systems of slavery. In these sections, I attempt to demonstrate the regional differences that led to the codifying of the African (and the descendent of the African) in colonial America as a legally constituted Other. Ultimately, many of the early processes presented in this chapter provided the foundation for separation between groups of people, based on racial differences, for what has now been the majority of this nation’s history.

From Religious to Scientific Foundations of Difference Increasing contact between groups of people during the age of European exploration and colonization brought with it a need to comprehend the differences between them. Prior to this era, direct contact between people of different parts of the world—with their varied cultures, languages, and physical characteristics—was limited. Thus the need for a framework for conceptualizing Others who were noticeably different in physical appearance, cultural practices, and other local and regional norms was critical in the development of theories of racial superiority that evolved during the era. The book of Genesis was used in the 1600s and 1700s by several early colonial administrators, as well as social leaders throughout Europe and the Americas, to frame conceptualizations of racial superiority. In his 1656 work A Theological Systeme Upon the Presupposition That Men Were Before Adam, Isaac La Peyrère articulated what became referred to as a pre-Adamic argument of the differences between Africans and Europeans. According to this perspective, Africans were created on the day before Adam in the book of Genesis. Because Adam, the father of humankind, was created on the sixth day of creation and animals were created on the fifth day, this argument suggested that Africans

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were not human, but part of the animal kingdom.2 Such a difference between the European as a human and the African as an animal was used as early justification for the development of separate categories and in some cases as a foundation for emergent systems of slavery. The book of Genesis also provided for many of the early slave traders and slaveholders a justification for the development of a system of slavery that coincided with emergent notions of difference. The story of Noah and his sons shared in Genesis 9:18–27 provided a biblical justification for slavery for a number of societies—including several in colonial America and parts of the early American republic. According to this story, after leaving his ark, Noah planted a vineyard from which he produced wine. After drinking the wine, Noah became drunk and fell asleep unclothed. His son Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his naked father and informed his brothers, Shem and Japheth. The two brothers backed into Noah’s tent, refusing to look at Noah’s unclothed body, and covered him with a cloth. Upon awakening and hearing that Ham had looked upon him nude, Noah placed a curse upon him which established Ham’s children as slaves to Shem and Japheth. Many early theologians argued that the children of these three brothers later populated different continents of the world—with the children of Ham populating regions such as Africa—that later provided slaves for many of the European colonies. In the 1600s and 1700s, several scientists and philosophers articulated an argument known as the Great Chain of Being. This perspective, grounded in classical Greek philosophy, linked all items—inanimate, animate, and even celestial beings—to one another. Under such a metaphorical linkage, it became common to argue that people coming from Africa were a step below people coming from Europe—thus providing justification for the systems of African enslavement that were arising in various European controlled territories. In 1699, for example, Dr. Edward Tyson’s Orang-outang, Sive, Homo sylvestris, or, The Anatomy of a Pygmie Compared with That of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man argued that pygmies served as a critical missing link between apes and humans. The political theorists of the Enlightenment, many of whom were studied to a great extent by the constitutional framers, developed their own conceptualizations of difference and what such conceptualizations meant in terms of justifications for slavery in the emerging Republic. In his 1748 essay “Of National Characters,” David Hume, for example, shared his perspectives on the inferiority of blacks to whites: I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to Whites. There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual, eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufacturers among them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the Whites,

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such as the ancient Germans, the present Tartars, have still something eminent about them, in their valour, form of government, or some other particular. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are Negro slaves dispersed all over Europe, of whom none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity, though low people, without education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one Negro as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.3

Several years later, Immanuel Kant built upon Hume’s arguments in his 1764 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime and established a comparison between the African and the European: The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that arises above the trifling. Mr. Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which the Negro has shown talent, and asserts that among hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though among whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble, and through superior gifts earn respect in the world. So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in colour.4

The enlightenment era also brought with it new approaches for building systems of classification. Carl Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae first published in the mid 1700s classified thousands of species of plants and animals. Among the category of Homo Sapiens, he classified four categories: Americanus, Asiaticus, Africanus, and Europanus and helped to frame an early discourse among European scientists on differences. Explorations on matters of classification enabled a debate to emerge in a theological context (as had been framed by La Peyrère or according to the biblical foundation established in Genesis 9:18–27) of sameness or difference in species between Africans and Europeans. Central to the framework that allowed a system of slavery to emerge was a question of type versus species within a strategy for examining the African. If Africans and Europeans were simply different types in the same species, then the task facing scientists of the day was to justify the reasons for the variance in type. If Africans and Europeans were of different species, however, then it made it much easier in the minds of many of the thinkers of the colonial, revolutionary, and constitutional eras to justify the societal divisions between groups.

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One of the early proponents of the notion that Africans were of a different species from Europeans was the Jamaican plantation owner and slave trader Edward Long. In his three volume The History of Jamaica (1774), Long argued that blacks from Africa were of a separate species from whites. He based much of his argument on the variations in skin tone and hair texture as well as other areas. Long’s primary contribution to the discussion on theories underscoring slavery was that it provided a shift from a theological to a pseudoscientific justification for difference between the races. In 1788, The Columbian Magazine reproduced segments of Long’s work under the title “Observations of the Gradation in the Scale of Being Between the Human and Brute Creation Including Some Curious Particulars Respecting Negroes.” In the selection published in the magazine, Long suggested that blacks were simply a different species in the same genus and asked, “Why shall we insist that man alone of all other animals is undiversified in the same manner, when we find so many irresistable proofs, which denote his conformity to the general system of the world?”5 Long’s argument that Africans were of a different species enabled him to frame a perspective that helped many of the policymakers of the early Republic to rationalize slavery. Blacks were, under this framework, of a lesser species than whites. As a result, their enslavement was a justifiable option for their role in American society. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson added to the conversation on differences between blacks and whites, helping to underscore justification for slavery in the early years of the Republic. Writing of blacks’ mental abilities, Jefferson noted: Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory, they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.6

He also depicted differences in appearance and odor: The first difference which strikes us is that of colour. Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immovable veil of

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black which covers all the emotions of the other race? . . . They have less hair on the face and body. They secrete less by the kidneys, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour.7

Ultimately, the social image of blacks that developed through various channels of discourse in the early years of the nation shaped a system, based on perception and classification, that influenced the lives of subsequent generations and underscored the development and institutionalization of a system of slavery.

The Codification of Slaves: The Virginia Case The development of various theories of difference underscored the institutionalization of slavery within the British colonies and in the American Republic. The colony and later the state of Virginia played a significant role in a codified form of Otherness that became assigned to the slaves within its borders. As John Rolfe’s journal entry indicates, Jamestown was the first place within the British colonies where Africans arrived in the early 1600s. A significant proportion of signers of the Declaration of Independence, The Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution were from the colony of Virginia. Thus, they were able to interject into the discourse on the framing documents a perspective of society, including the role of slavery that was influenced by their worldview as Virginians. At the time of Rolfe’s 1619 entry, many of the colonies had implemented a form of indenture that numerous people coming from England had used as a means for their transport to the colonies. Such forms of indenture were often established for a contracted period of time and frequently were in exchange for years of servitude to those individuals who had helped to pay for their transport. Virginia, like many other early British colonies, did not have specific legal codes that established the roles of blacks as a separate group within the early colonies. As a result, for many of the early white arrivals into Virginia, systems of indenture were established that reflected the system that was in place at the time. In a relatively brief period, however, that changed. A legalized Otherness in the form of slave codes not only framed a specific role for blacks but also constructed a notion of human property. Many of these initial differences were reflected in the length of service. For many whites, service frequently had a time frame with a specified end date, normally seven years following the start of service. For black indentured servants, time frames for the end of service were often not established.

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Twenty years following the arrival of the first blacks to Jamestown, the colonial council passed its first law distinguishing blacks from others living in the colony. According to Act X of the Statute of 1639, “All persons except Negroes are to be provided with arms and ammunition or be fined at the pleasure of the governor and council.”8 In the 1640s, the Virginia legislature noted differences in the punishments for runaway indentured servants. Also beginning in the 1640s, the Virginia Assembly began to refer to black women servants as tithable, which is a distinctive category in which white servants were not placed. In 1659, Virginia statutes made their first reference to black slaves. With the formal recognition of slavery within the state, a series of laws and procedures could rapidly be enacted to establish the conduct pertaining to slaves within Virginian society. Ten years later, in 1669, the Virginia legislature informed slave owners that they would not be punished for the killing of a slave, thus suggesting that slaves were less than human and that their mortality was relatively insignificant. One set of questions that the legislature wrestled with in the early years of defining slaves as property dealt with various rights related to the transfer of ownership of the slaves. In 1671, the legislature attempted to define the status of slaves in a statute that focused on the distribution of the estate of an orphan, thus providing an important link in the defining of the slave as property in Virginia society. The legislature noted: In a former act it is provided that sheep, horses, cattle should be delivered in kind to an orphan when he comes of age, to which some have desired that Negroes be added; this Assembly considering the difficulty of procuring Negroes in kind as also the value and hazard of their lives has doubted whether any sufficient men could be found who would engage themselves or deliver Negroes of equal ages if the special Negroes should die, or become by age or accident unserviceable; it is enacted, that at discretion of the courts Negroes may be appraised, sold at an outcry, or preserved in kind, as it is deemed most expedient for the preservation or advancement of the estates of orphans.9

By the early 1700s, it was commonly recognized that slaves would be considered property; however, questions about further specifics related to this classification still remained. Should slaves be considered realty (that is, property like land and buildings) or personality (movable property like horses and wagons) or some combination or modification of the two? By the mideighteenth century, southern jurisdictions had settled on the legal definition of a slave as a “chattel personal.” The 1730 case of Tucker v. Sweney helped in this clarification by noting,

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Negroes notwithstanding the Act making the Real Estate remain in the Hands of the Ex’ors by that Act as Chatels and as such do vest in them for payment of debts So that in the Case they are considered no otherwise than Horses or Cattle, And there is no doubt but the Increase of any living Creature after the death of the Testor, are looked upon as part of his Estate, and are liable to be taken for his Debts.10

With this ruling, the legal transformation of the black person living in Virginia to a status as a formal Other, that of a slave in Virginia society, was complete.

Colonial Variations While Virginia and its neighboring state of Maryland had half of the slaves in the British colonies by the time of the Revolutionary War, it is important to note the unique processes that evolved within other colonial frameworks for conceptualizing the slave as The Other within society. Several examples illustrate the diversity of processes and factors that influenced the construction of the slave as The Other. Massachusetts In 1645, two Africans who had been caught during a raid on an African village were brought into the Massachusetts colony. Upon learning of the slaves, the Massachusetts General Court was able to secure possession of the slaves and return them to Africa. The action of the court was partially based on the 1641 Colonial Act of Massachusetts, also known as the Body of Liberties, which noted: There shall never be any bond slaverie, villinage or Captivitie amongst us, unless it be lawful Captives taken in just warres, and such strangers as willingly sell themselves or are just sold to us. And these shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of God established in Israeli concerning such persons doth morally require. This exempts none from servitude who shall be Judged thereto by Authoritie.11

While the act was specific in its opposition to the concept of slavery, as a British colony, Massachusetts had to abide by British law regarding slaves. In this case, such a requirement meant that Massachusetts was obligated to receive slaves who came into port. By 1675, slave codes began to form in Massachusetts. They were influenced by three factors. The first was the puritanical influence on slavery. The Puri-

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tans regarded themselves as persons divinely committed to the stewardship of their slaves. Slaves were frequently referred to as servants (as opposed to “slaves”). Because of a puritanical belief that salvation required knowing the Bible, many masters even taught their slaves to read and write. They could acquire, hold, and transfer property. They were entitled to a trial by jury, they could sue whites, and they could appeal suits to the colony’s highest courts. Second was the lack of a plantation system, which meant there was less of a need for slaves than in the South, where agrarian labor was critical. In Massachusetts, however, where agriculture slowly gave way to trade and manufacturing, slaves moved into the skilled trades, where they competed with white artisans, driving down wages and prices. The hostility of white workers to slave competition proved to be a powerful element in the movement to abolish slavery within the state. The third influence on Massachusetts’ slave codes was related to the colony’s general role in the revolutionary discourse. As home to such events as the Boston Tea Party, the Boston Massacre, and the battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill, many of the Massachusetts people were involved with critical revolutionary activities. This revolutionary ethos led to the Declaration of Rights in Massachusetts’ 1780 Constitution, which noted, All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their Lives and Liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.12

Despite the passage of the Massachusetts Constitution, it was not until 1783 that the state’s chief justice declared slavery unconstitutional. The 1781 and 1783 Quock Walker cases, which caused the state court to do so, take their name from a slave who was purchased in 1754 by James Caldwell of Worchester, Massachusetts. Following Caldwell’s death in 1763, Walker was transferred to Caldwell’s wife, Isabell. In 1773, upon her death, Walker was transferred to Nathaniel Jennison, the man Isabell had married after Caldwell’s death. When he reached his twentyfifth birthday, Walker claimed that Caldwell had promised him his freedom by the age of twenty-four or twenty-five, and that Isabell had promised him his freedom by the age of twenty-one. Jennison, however, refused to free him. Recognizing that, with Jennison, he wouldn’t be freed, Walker fled to a farm owned by Caldwell’s younger brothers. Jennison caught him there, beat him severely, and locked him in one of his barns. Jennison then took the Caldwell brothers to court (Jennison v. Caldwell, 1781) for inciting his slave to run away and for the loss of property. Two years later, Walker sued Jennison for assault

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and battery (Walker v. Jennison, 1783). Central to the argument in Walker’s case was the notion of slavery being contrary to the will of God. Ultimately, with such questions focused on how slavery compared with God’s will and questions of slavery in relation to the “free and equal” clause in the Massachusetts Constitution, slavery in Massachusetts was outlawed. It is important to note that, although the 1783 action by the Massachusetts Supreme Court provided a foundation for slavery’s abolition in Massachusetts, it did not prevent the later development of a status of second-class citizenship to emerge for blacks in Massachusetts, which extended well into the late twentieth century. Africans and the descendents of Africans saw the dissolution of their status as slaves in Massachusetts evolve into a rapidly developed form of Otherness. South Carolina In the late 1730s, anticipating war between England and Spain, the Spanish governor of Florida announced that any English slave who was able to escape to St. Augustine would be granted his or her freedom. The announcement was based on the fact that slaves represented the largest segment of the population in South Carolina in the 1700s. Responding to this announcement, roughly sixty slaves escaped from the Charlestown area and began a march toward St. Augustine in early September of 1739. Along the route they broke into several homes and killed several whites. Near the town of Stono, South Carolina, the local militia caught up with them and outnumbered them in a September 9 battle in which forty of the escaped slaves died. One major result of what became known as the Stono Rebellion was that it forced many whites to think about how to address the reality of South Carolina’s demographics as a slave-holding society in which blacks outnumbered whites, and the resulting impact of possible slave revolts. In 1720, the total black population in South Carolina numbered 12,000 out of a total population size of 17,000. Increasing prosperity for the colony led to an increase in the number of slaves imported in the years following 1730. By 1750, of the 45,000 people in South Carolina, 30,000 were black.13 The number of slaves in South Carolina and their outnumbering of the white population was of concern to white South Carolinians as far back as 1698, when a legislative act sought to establish a ratio of one white servant to every six slaves.14 In 1730, English authorities, acting from concern on the outnumbering of blacks to whites in South Carolina, instructed the South Carolina governor to encourage the importing of white people to counteract what was perceived as a rapidly growing black population.

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The Stono uprising reinforced concerns about the number of slaves in South Carolina, and led to the discussion of strategies to minimize the number of slaves there. In April of 1740, the state’s General Assembly decided to drastically reduce the number of slaves entering the colony by passing a “Negro duty bill,” increasing the tax on incoming slaves to ten times the rate of previous duties. In May of that year, the General Assembly passed a revised version of a slave code for the colony that called for new regulation in the governing of slaves. Under these new rules, slaves were held to be chattel, they were prohibited from gathering, learning to read and write, and having access to alcohol.15 These new codes were the result of new processes through which the slave in South Carolina was conceptualized as The Other. It also provided an example of how a ruling body of whites reworked the legal codes to respond to its fears of The Other. In South Carolina, the severity of the codes was balanced in order to advance control without leading to revolts in areas where slaves outnumbered white slave owners and non–slave owners.

Conclusion Writing more than two hundred years after the arrival of the first twenty Africans into Jamestown, Frederick Douglass described his personal transformation under the brutality of slavery. “I was broken in body, soul, and spirit,” he shared. “My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!”16 Douglass was writing in an era when notions of superiority, many with biblical or scientific foundations, had long been embedded in the typification schemes of individuals framing American social institutions. Such notions provided the foundations for the development of the institution of slavery. Douglass’ metamorphosis was the product of socially fossilized conceptualizations of the slave as The Other in U.S. society and the development of institutions that reinforced such construction of the slave. Ultimately, many of the codified notions of Otherness came into play in the centuries following the Jamestown arrivals—as policies were shaped for their descendents in the years immediately following and for their descendents in later generations.

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Notes 1. Maurice R. Davie, Negroes in American Society. (New York: Whittlesey, 1949), 17. 2. Richard Popkin, The Religious Background of Seventeenth Century Philosophy. In D. Garber and M. Ayers (eds.), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, Vol. 1. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 413. 3. David Hume, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. (Edinburg, UK: James Walker, 1825), 521–22. 4. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 110. 5. Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550–1812. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 492. 6. Robert Beverly, The History and Present State of Virginia. (London: R. Parker, 1705), 266. 7. Ibid., 264–65. 8. A. Leon Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 32. 9. Ibid., 51. 10. Ibid., 53. 11. A Coppie of the Liberties of the Massachusetts Collonie in New England, 1641. In William MacDonald (ed.), Select Charters and Other Documents, Illustrative of American History 1606–1775. (London: Macmillan, 1899), 86. 12. Article 1. Part The First: A Declaration of the Rights of the Inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1780). Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Retrieved on May 18, 2008 from www.mass.gov/legis/const .htm#cart106.htm. 13. Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 116. 14. Higginbotham, 159. 15. Ibid., 193–98. 16. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1960), 94–95.

4 The Native American as The Other

HEN THE SETTLERS LANDED IN WHAT WOULD BECOME KNOWN as the thirteen British-American colonies, there were already scores of people from different nations living there. In time, their unique cultures, customs, and languages were simplified through typification that framed a more unified notion of a singular group in the minds of the newer arrivals and many of their descendents. Distinct groups of people known as the Hassinuga, the Manahoal, the Taxnitania, and the Ontoponea became, in the minds of many of the newer settlers, simply Indians. In 1643, Roger Williams provided an overview of the names that the colonists applied to the Native Americans. “First, those of the English giving: as Natives, Salvages, Indians, Wild-men, (so the Dutch call them Wilden), Abergeny men, Pagans, Barbarians, Heathen,” he observed.1 These names reflected the socially constructed image of the Native American shared by many English settlers. The Others—the “Wildmen”—were not like the English. They needed to be tamed and brought under the colonialists’ control. In much of the early interactions between the English and the native tribes, this notion of The Other—of these “Salvages” (using Williams’ term), or “savages” in modern language—shaped government policies in the colonies and ultimately in the emergent Republic. This chapter examines in detail the context of Native Americans as The Other in a political and administrative framework in the early years of the Republic, beginning in the early 1600s, ultimately through the land removal process of the 1800s. I begin with an examination of the perspectives that emerged during the early interactions between Native Americans and European settlers. Many of

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these early interactions were framed with a backdrop of religion being used for understanding and contextualizing the difference. I continue with interactions during the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary eras and conclude with an examination of the policies of land removal of the 1880s. Ultimately, I argue throughout the chapter that evolving notions of the Native American as The Other enabled the emergence of policies of removal and other atrocities committed by actors working in political and administrative roles.

Early Perspectives The first European adversaries that many of the Native Americans confronted were the diseases brought by the colonial settlers. By most accounts, European diseases devastated many Native American communities. Estimates of the impact of disease on the Powhatan Confederacy in what is now Virginia, for example, note a loss of 78 percent of the population between 1607, the year of Jamestown’s founding, to 1669. In 1705, historian Robert Beverly observed that “the Indians of Virginia are almost wasted”2 as a result of diseases the European settlers had brought to the New World. For many of the settlers, the decimation of various Native American communities by disease was perceived as a divine statement that the lands being settled were meant for European occupation. Reflecting on the impact of disease on the Native Americans in New England, John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, noted to a friend in England in 1634 that “[the natives] are neere all dead of small Poxe, so as the Lorde hathe cleared our title to what we possess.”3 Likewise, Edward Winslow remarked in 1621 that “God had sent a wonderful plague among the savages to destroy them and to leave most of their lands free for civilized cultivation and occupation.”4 In the minds of many colonialists, they had been placed in the Americas as a result of God’s will, and the Native American was being destroyed by an epidemic that was also a product of God’s will. Such a notion of divine intervention was one indicator of basic distinctions the English saw between themselves and the Native Americans. The colonial lack of understanding of the religious traditions of Native Americans further led to the belief among many of the early settlers that Native Americans were under satanic influences, a perspective supported by the colonists’ explanation of the impact of disease. In New England, the puritanical perspective held that, because the work of the Puritans was the work of God, any Native Americans working in opposition to them clearly were working under the influence of evil forces. In Virginia, Captain John

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Smith noted of the Native Americans he met, “Their chiefe God they worship is the Divell.”5 While at the same time that the imagery of the devil-worshipping savage appeared in many colonial references to the Native American, interdependency sometimes emerged and colonists found themselves reliant upon many of the groups of Native Americans they encountered. When some groups of colonists did not have adequate supplies of food, Native Americans provided for them. In other cases, colonists were allowed to live on lands that Native American communities had developed for hunting purposes. In 1621, this dependency caused the London Council to instruct Captain John Smith and other leaders of the Jamestown colony to break their dependence on “the Salvages . . . whom long ere this should have beene fed and relived by the English, not the English by them. . . .”6 In his 1613 pamphlet Goode Newes from Virginia, minister Alexander Whitaker helped underscore the dual image of the Native American. He first presented for his readers a picture of the Native American savage: Let the miserable condition of these naked slaves of the divell move you to compassion toward them. They acknowledge that there is a great good God, but know him not, having the eyes of their understanding as yet blinded: wherefore they serve the divell for feare, after a most base manner, sacrificing sometimes (as I have heere heard) their own Children to him . . . . Their priests . . . are no other but such as our English witches are. They live naked in bodie, as if their shame of their sinne deserved no covering: Their names are as naked as their bodie: They esteem it a virtue to lie, deceive and steale as their master the divell teacheth to them.7

Whitaker’s goal, like that of many of the missionaries of the era, was partially to enlarge his congregation of religiously saved individuals. However, because religious salvation and the growth of his congregation were among his goals—and these were underscored by the general interests of the Virginia Company to expand its settlement—he made certain that his depiction did not negate the Native Americans’ potential for being brought into the spiritual community. As he noted, But if any of us should misdoubt that this barbarous people is uncapable of such heavenly mysteries, let such men know that they are farre mistaken in the nature of these men, for the promise of God, which is without respect to persons, made as well to unwise men after the flesh, as to the wise, and let us not thinke that these men are so simple as some have supposed them: for they are of bodie lustie, strong, and very nimble. They are a very understanding generation, quick of

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apprehension, suddaine in their dispatches, subtile in their dealings, exquisite in their inventions, and industrious in their labour.8

The savage image that was being articulated was partially underscored by what some Europeans perceived as a natural state of existence. In his 1609 Nova Brittania, Richard Johnson noted that Virginia was inhabited with wild and savage people, that live and lie up and downe in troupes like heards of Deere in a Forrest: they have no law but nature, their apparel skinnes of beasts, but most goe naked: the better sort have houses, but poore ones, they have no Arts nor Science, yet they live under superior command such as it is, they are generally very loving and gentle, and do entertaine and relieve our people with great kindness: they are easy to be brought to good, and would fayne embrace a better condition.9

Underscoring the development of various perceptions was the emergence of a form of literature that helped to expand the depiction of the Native American as The Other. Captivity narratives, accounts by whites who claimed that Native Americans had captured them, aided in painting an image of the Native American as the savage and helped lay the groundwork for the resultant policy responses. In 1702, Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, for example, told the story of whites who had supposedly been captured by Native Americans. In fine, when the children of the English captives cried at any time so that they were not presently quieted, the manner of the Indians was to dash out their brains against a tree . . . and the Indians in the frolicks would whip and beat the small children, until they set ’em into grievous outcries, and then throw ’em to their amazed mothers for them to quiet ’em again as well as they could.10

A critical turning point in colonial imagery of Native Americans came during the French and Indian War (1754–1763). Fought primarily as proxy wars, since the French had a much smaller population in the Americas than the British, many of the battles were fought as a system of skirmishes between British subjects and French who were in allegiance with a larger number of Native Americans than the British. In describing events in these skirmishes in his 1762 French and Indian Cruelty Exemplified, in the Life and Various Vicissitudes of Fortune, of Peter Williamson, Peter Williamson added to the literary tradition partially begun by Cotton Mather by sharing stories of Native American savagery directed against captives. In one section of the work, Williamson describes the torture inflicted by a group of Native Americans upon their white captives:

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where one of the villains, with his scalping knife, ripped open their bellies, took out their entrails, and burned them before their eyes, whilst others were cutting, piercing, and tearing the flesh from their breasts, hands, arms, and legs with red hot irons, till they were dead.11

Such imagery of cruelty helped to justify some British generals’ harsher tactics against Native Americans. In 1763, for example, after a defeat by a Frenchaligned indigenous military alliance organized by the Ottawa leader Pontiac, Lord Jeffrey Amherst wrote a letter to a subordinate suggesting that gifts be distributed to Pontiac as a supposed offering of peace. In a postscript to the letter, Amherst directed his subordinate to infect the gifts with smallpox. His subordinate replied, “I will try to [contaminate] them with some blankets that may fall into their hands, and take care not to get the disease myself.” In response, Amherst suggested, “You will do well to [infect] the Indians by means of blankets as well as try every other method that can serve to extirpate this [execrable] race.”12 On June 24, Captain Ecuyer of the Royal Americans noted in his journal, “We gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the smallpox hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.” The impact was far more than Ecuyer imagined, as the resultant toll among the Ottawas, Mingos, Miamis, Lenni Lenapes (Delaware), and other groups was over 100,000 dead.13

The Revolutionary War and Era of American Independence The Revolutionary War era witnessed a continuation of many of the colonial perspectives of Native Americans that had developed during the French and Indian Wars. In his 1777 History of America, William Robertson further promoted the concept of the Native American savage as the most fitting description of the tribal communities. Of the various tribes, he noted that Among these, though with some diversity in their character, their manners and institutions, the state of society was nearly similar and so extremely rude, that the denomination of savage may be applied to them all.14

As in the French and Indian War, Native American alliances were perceived as vital to both sides of the conflict. In July of 1776, British Colonel Guy Johnson and Joseph Brant, a Mohawk chief also known as Thayendanega, returned to the American colonies from Britain. While there, Brant had become convinced that the Native American future lay with the British crown and not the American colonists.

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Brant was able to persuade four of the six Iroquois nations to fight against the Americans. His encouragement of the Iroquois to join the British side of the war and his involvement in several of the more brutal battles between Americans and Native Americans (allied with the British), as well as his command of a group of peasant Loyalists during the war fueled the image of Native Americans as savage warriors and of Thayendanegea as a particularly savage warrior. In 1809, British poet Thomas Campbell helped to immortalize Brant as a savage in his poem “Gertrude of Wyoming.” In it he refers to the “Monster Brant” and describes Brant’s “howling desolating band” as a group of blood-drinking marauders wrecking devastation on various lands. One technique used by British and American soldiers also shaped images of the fierce savage warrior. On occasion, British and Americans would dress their soldiers as Native Americans, thus enabling them to argue that the Native Americans were the perpetrators of various war time acts of violence. On August 6, 1779, for example, Colonel Daniel Brodhead admitted in a report to General John Sullivan that he had dressed his troops like Native Americans in order to take scalps. In 1777, Colonel John Harper dressed as a Mohawk to intimidate residents of a nearby neutral town, and General Sullivan occasionally dressed his scouts as Native Americans as they engaged in military campaigns.15 As was the case in the French and Indian War, depictions of savagery by Native Americans helped to justify acts of savagery by colonial and revolutionary powers. On the western frontier of the Revolutionary War in 1779, General Washington ordered General John Sullivan, who was in command of forces in western New York, to “lay waste all the settlements around . . . that the country not only be overrun but destroyed, [and not to] listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlement is effected.”16 Washington lauded the campaign, praising its “destruction of the whole of the towns and the settlements of the hostile Indians in so short a time, and with so inconsiderable a loss in men.”17 At the same time, in what became known as the “squaw campaign,” Colonel Daniel Brodhead and his troops slaughtered hundreds of Hotinonshonni women and children. The justification used by Brodhead for this destruction was the “savagery” of the Native Americans, a Native American savagery that Brodhead and other members of the American military argued was a result of British influence.18

Immediate Postindependence: To Conquer or Civilize The Other The departure of the British following the war left the Native American nations that had sided with them at a disadvantage in dealing with the Americans. It also

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left in the minds of many of Americans an image of Native Americans that was shaped by wartime propaganda. As a result, questions emerged about what official policy on Native Americans would develop in the young Republic. Two theories surfaced on potential directions for the relationship between Native American nations and the United States. The first was a conquest theory, which argued that the Native American nations that had decided to ally with the losing side in the struggle had lost all their rights. In 1784, James Duane advised the governor of New York not to treat the Iroquois as equals, saying, “I would never suffer the word ‘nation’ or ‘six nations’ or ‘confederates,’ or ‘council fire at Onondago’ or any form which would revive or seem to confirm their former ideas of independence. They should rather be taught that the public opinion of their importance has long since ceased.”19 This perspective was also shared by Governor George Clinton of New York, who argued that “we are not to have peace on our frontier until the straggling Indians and Tories who infest it are exterminated or driven back and their settlements destroyed.”20 The second was a theory of engagement. One of the primary proponents of such an approach was Henry Knox, the secretary of war under George Washington. Knox argued for a conciliatory and not belligerent stance toward the Native Americans, basing his argument on the anticipated difficulty that the small military force of the United States would have in completely defeating the Native Americans. Knox advocated for a policy that would recognize Native American communities as foreign nations and acknowledge their claims to the lands they occupied. One of the pressing challenges facing the young Republic in the years following the War for Independence was a financial challenge. At that stage in its evolution, the country could not generate revenue through the taxation of citizens. A solution was identified through the sale of lands to individuals willing to settle beyond the lands of the thirteen original colonies. A chief architect of the policies that enabled expansion, including The Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, was Thomas Jefferson. As such policies for selling land to settlers were enacted, the question of how to deal with the people already inhabiting the lands was inevitable. In his first message to Congress, President Jefferson noted, Among our Indian neighbors also a spirit of peace and friendship generally prevails, and I am happy to inform you that the continued efforts to introduce among them the implements and the practice of husbandry and of the household arts have not been without success; that they are becoming more and more sensible of the superiority of this dependence for clothing and subsistence over the precarious resources of hunting and fishing, and already we are able to announce that instead of that constant diminution of their numbers produced by

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their wars and their wants, some of them begin to experience and increase of population.21

The completion of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 provided an opportunity for further expansion; however, the problem of how to address the Native American populations that lived on lands targeted by expansion fueled much of the tension that existed between Native Americans and the nascent American government. In a February 27, 1803 letter to Governor Harrison, Jefferson noted that the Indians “will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi.” If any tribe were “fool Hardy” enough to make war on the United States, Jefferson proposed “the seizing of the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace.”22 Frustrated by resistance from the Shawnee and other nations to American expansion, Jefferson proposed a solution to the “Indian problem.” According to his plan, a zone would be created between U.S. and European holdings and would be inhabited by eastern Native Americans. Under such a plan, tribes would be encouraged to surrender their lands in the east and then be provided tracts of equal size west of the Mississippi. Such an approach provided further foundations for what ultimately became the land removal policies of the U.S. government.

Paternalism, Removal, and The Other In 1823, Edward Everett, who would later become the President of Harvard, Governor of Massachusetts, and U.S. Secretary of State, argued in The North American Review that white conquest of the Indians was inevitable, because of what he saw as white superiority over what he referred to as the “aboriginal savages.” While Everett acknowledged that Native Americans were among the first people to inhabit the lands of North America, he argued that their lack of civilization nullified their claims to the land because “barbarous tribes have but a partial and imperfect right in the soil; that they cannot allege a prior occupancy of the forests and plains, which they do not in any civilized sense occupy.”23 According to Everett, a challenge that Native Americans faced was that they rapidly tended to adopt the vices of whites, in particular, the use of alcohol. Rather conveniently, he connected these vices with the Native American’s susceptibility to disease: they take our diseases, and small pox, with aggravated ravages, hastens their extinction . . . [b]y the operation of these causes, the Indian population is thinned,

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crowded together, driven off: a melancholy spectacle to the survivors, and brought about as we have stated, partly by the vices of the settlers; but yet not by any of that tyranny and oppression commonly urged.24

The notion of the spread of disease and vice to Native Americans from whites as an outcome of their mere proximity to white settlements became a reoccurring argument for what became removal policies. Saving Native Americans, according to such policies, meant limiting their interaction with whites. Thus for Everett, a policy of land removal benefited Native Americans as much as it did whites. “Humanitarian” justification for Indian land removal policies, such as those articulated by Everett, became increasingly common throughout the 1820s. By removing Native Americans and placing them on lands farther west, advocates argued that they were protecting them against disease, alcohol, and competition from “more civilized” whites. In 1825, for example, President Monroe recommended a law removing all tribes east of the Mississippi River. In Monroe’s opinion, such a policy would prove beneficial to both Native Americans and whites at the time: The digest of such a government, with the consent of the Indians, which should be endowed with sufficient power to meet all the objects contemplated—to connect the several tribes together in a bond of amity and preserve order in each; to prevent intrusions on their property; to teach them by regular instruction the arts of civilized life and make them a civilized people—is an object of very high importance. It is the powerful consideration which we have to offer to these tribes as an inducement to relinquish the lands on which they now reside and to remove to those which are designated. It is not doubted that this arrangement will present considerations of sufficient force to surmount all their prejudices in favor of the soil of their nativity, however strong they may be. Their elders have sufficient intelligence to discern the certain progress of events in the present train, and sufficient virtue, by yielding to momentary sacrifices, to protect their families and posterity from inevitable destruction. They will also perceive that they may thus attain an elevation to which as communities they could not otherwise aspire. . . . It may fairly be presumed that, through the agency of such a government, the condition of all the tribes inhabiting that vast region may be essentially improved; that permanent peace may be preserved with them, and our commerce be much extended.25

Shortly after winning the presidency in 1828, Andrew Jackson articulated his support for Native American land removal policies. Jackson’s perspectives on Native Americans had been influenced by military expeditions he led, some noted for their levels of extreme brutality, against the Creek Nation in 1814 and the Seminoles in 1818. His policies reflected a framework of protectionism and

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patronage, which stemmed in part from a position stated by others in The North American Review series on Native Americans. As he noted in his First Annual Message to Congress in 1829, Our conduct toward these people is deeply interesting to our national character. Their present condition, contrasted with what they once were, makes a most powerful appeal to our sympathies. Our ancestors found them the uncontrolled possessors of these vast regions. By persuasion and force they have been made to retire from river to river and from mountain to mountain, until some of the tribes have become extinct and others have left but remnants to preserve for awhile their once terrible names. Surrounded by the whites with their arts of civilization, which by destroying the resources of the savage doom him to weakness and decay, the fate of the Mohegan, the Narragausett, and the Delaware is fast overtaking the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Creek. That this fate surely awaits them if they remain within the limits of the States does not admit of a doubt. Humanity and national honor demand that every effort should be made to avert so great a calamity. It is too late to inquire whether it was just in the United States to include them and their territory within the bounds of new States, whose limits they could control. That step cannot be retraced. A State cannot be dismembered by Congress or restricted in the exercise of her constitutional power. But the people of those States and of every State, actuated by feelings of justice and a regard for our national honor, submit to you the interesting question whether something cannot be done, consistently with the rights of the States, to preserve this much-injured race.26

By his second congressional address a year later, Jackson was able to further articulate what he argued were benefits of removal policies for Native Americans: The consequences of a speedy removal will be important to the United States, to individual States, and to the Indians themselves. The pecuniary advantages which it promises to the Government are the least of its recommendations. It puts an end to all possible danger of collision between the authorities of the General and State Governments on account of the Indians. It will place a dense and civilized population in large tracts of country now occupied by a few savage hunters. By opening the whole territory between Tennessee on the north and Louisiana on the south to the settlement of the whites it will incalculably strengthen the southwestern frontier and render the adjacent States strong enough to repel future invasions without remote aid. It will relieve the whole State of Mississippi and the western part of Alabama of Indian occupancy, and enable those States to advance rapidly in population, wealth, and power. It will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites; free them from the power of the States; enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions; will retard the progress of decay,

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which is lessening their numbers, and perhaps cause them gradually, under the protection of the Government and through the influence of good counsels, to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community.27

In 1830, just a year after taking office, Jackson introduced a new piece of legislation titled the “Indian Removal Act.” It gave the president power to negotiate removal treaties with Native American tribes living east of the Mississippi. Under these treaties, the Native Americans were to give up their lands east of the Mississippi in exchange for lands to the west. Those wishing to remain in the east would become citizens of their home state. This act affected not only the southeastern nations but many others farther north. The removal was supposed to be voluntary and peaceful, and it was for the tribes that agreed to its conditions.

Land Removal and The “Five Civilized Tribes” For several years, particularly in the years following the War of 1812, members of the Native American nations of the lower southeast United States became subject to the attempts of numerous missionary groups, frequently with federal support, to subject them to processes of “civilization.” Hundreds of children and adults were trained in new forms of agricultural production, English literacy, and in Christianity. Recognizing that much of their survival was dependent upon their adopting ways that were alien to their own processes, several communities began to adopt the new customs. In some cases, Native Americans adopted forms of governance from the United States. In 1827, for example, the Cherokee Nation in Georgia established a constitution for its own government, modeled on the one developed by the framers of the U.S. Constitution. Members of the Georgia legislature, however, were incensed that the Cherokees would go to such a process as they claimed that such action mocked the U.S. Constitution. In response, the Georgia legislature passed a resolution that addressed Georgia’s concerns: Resolved, that all the lands appropriated and unappropriated within the conventional limits of Georgia, belong to her absolutely; that the title is in her; that the Indians are tenants at her will; that she may at any time she pleases determine their tenancy, by taking possession of the premises; and that Georgia has the right to extend her authority and laws over the whole territory, and to coerce obedience to them from all descriptions of people, be they white, red, or black, within her limits.28

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Underscoring many of the tensions between the Georgia legislature and the Cherokee were concerns stemming from the increasing incidents of raids, by frontiersmen on the lands of Cherokee families. During the raids, frontiersmen stole cattle and horses, destroyed property, and occasionally harmed the Cherokee living on the land. The legislature refused to do anything about this mounting crisis. In the early 1830s, the Cherokee argued several cases on territorial rights in various courts. In 1832, the Supreme Court ruled in their favor in the case of Worchester v. Georgia, in which the Court decided that the state of Georgia had no right to extend its laws over the Cherokee Nation. Chief Justice Marshall, in writing the majority opinion, noted that “The Cherokee Nation . . . is a distinct community, occupying its own territory . . . which the citizens of Georgia have no right to enter, but with the assent of the Cherokees themselves, or in conformity with treaties and with the acts of Congress.”29 Despite the decision of the Court, the Cherokee found themselves at odds with the state and federal government on land issues, and continual raids by various frontiersmen and squatters occurred. With pressure mounting on all of the members of the nations of the southeastern region to respond to treaties under the Indian Removal Act, the Choctaw became the first nation to sign a treaty under the Removal Act. Their signing of the Dancing Rabbit Creek treaty in 1830 led to some division, and ultimately a number of members of the nation remained in Mississippi. The Choctaw who remained in Mississippi found themselves victims of fraud and with white squatters on their land; the federal government chose to take minimal action in their defense. In March of 1832, the Jackson Administration persuaded the Creeks to relinquish much of their land in return for a pledge that the remainder of their land would be allotted to the chiefs’ family heads. The administration also promised to protect the Creeks against intrusions on their allotments and against forcible eviction from Alabama. Nonetheless, white squatters began to defraud the Creeks, driving them from their homes. By 1835, members of the Creek nation began to steal crops and livestock for survival, and engage in violent retaliation against many of the squatters. The U.S. government used the resultant violence as justification for forceful involvement and ultimately forceful removal of Creeks to areas on the far side of the Mississippi River. In 1832, the Jackson administration signed an allotment treaty with the Chickasaw Nation. The Chickasaws had agreed to emigrate before 1831 if the United States would provide them with a suitable new location. Because they were viewed as related to the Choctaws, the Jackson administration was confident that the Chickasaw would react favorably to removal. According to the treaty that was negotiated, the United States would sell Chickasaw land at a

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fair price, hold the funds in trust for them, and protect that Chickasaws from intruders while they searched for a new home. Shortly after the signing of the treaty however, white settlers moved in quickly, thus negating many of the terms of the treaty.

Conclusion Between 1830 and 1850, roughly 100,000 Native Americans living between Michigan, Louisiana, and Florida moved west as a result of coerced treaties and military action during the era. Statistics related to the losses in life experienced, however, speak to the gravity of what many of the Native American communities endured. It is estimated that 3,500 Creeks died in Alabama and on their westward journey.30 The Choctaws lost 15 percent of their population. The Creeks, Seminoles, and Cherokee are estimated to have lost 50 percent or more of their populations as a result of the conditions they faced during the course of their forced movement westward. Underscoring much of the forced relocation was a justification based partially on a European and later American image of the Native American as The Other. This image was one that can be traced to the 1600s, frequently to a vision of the Native American as the savage, and later as one needing to be removed from areas where there might be interaction with white settlers. Ultimately, this led to the removal, marginalization, and deaths of hundreds of men, women, and children—all at the hands of administrators and political leaders working in what was perceived and promoted as being within the scope of the national and regional interest on how to deal with matters pertaining to this group of constructed Others.

Notes 1. Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America: Or, an Help to the Language of the Natives in that Part of America Called New-England. Together, with Briefe Observations of the Customes, Manners, and Worships, etc. of the Aforesaid Natives, in Peace and Warre, in Life and Death. On All which are Added Spirituall Observations, General and Particular by the Author of Chiefe and Special Use (Upon All Occasions) to All the English Inhabiting Those Parts; Yet Pleasant and Profitable to the View of All Men. (London: Gregory Dexter, 1643), 84. 2. Robert Beverly, The History and Present State of Virginia. (London: R. Parker, 1705), 175. 3. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 208.

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4. Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 19. 5. Ibid., 15. 6. James Wilson, The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America. (New York: Grove Press, 2000), 66. 7. Edward Neill, History of the Virginia Company of London with Letters to and from the First Colony Never Before Printed. (Albany, NY: Joel Munsell, 1869), 80. 8. Ibid. 9. Pearce, 12. 10. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana. (Hartford, CT: Silas Andrus and Son, 1853), 599–600. 11. James Wimer, Events in Indian History. (Lancaster, PA: G. Hills and Co., 1841), 584. 12. Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987). 13. Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide. (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers, 1998), 154. 14. William Robertson, History of America, Vol. 7. (London: BA Taylor, 1821), 317. 15. Barbara Alice Mann, George Washington’s War on Native America (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005), 9. 16. Churchill, 149. 17. Barbara Alice Mann, George Washington’s War on Native America. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 295. 18. James Wilson (2000) The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America New York, NY: Grove Press), 129. 19. Robert Marshall Utley and Wilcomb E. Washburn, Indian Wars. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Books, 2002), 112. 20. Francis W. Halsey, The Old New York Frontier: Its Wars with Indians and Tories, Its Missionary Schools, Pioneers, and Land Titles 1614–1800. (New York: Scribner’s and Sons, 1901), 233. 21. Thomas Jefferson, First Message to Congress, December 8, 1801. In Andrew Lipscomb (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. (Washington, DC: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903–1905), 328. 22. Thomas Jefferson to William Henry Harrison, February 27, 1803. In Andrew Lipscomb (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. (Washington, DC: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903–1905), 368. 23. Edward Everett. On the Sate of the Indians. The North American Review (1823), 14, 32. 24. Ibid. 25. James Monroe, Special Message to Congress, January 27, 1825. In J. D. Richardson (ed.), A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1902, Vol. 2. (Washington, DC: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1905), 28. 26. Andrew Jackson, First Annual Message to Congress, December 8, 1829. In J. D. Richardson (ed.), A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1902, Vol. 2. (Washington, DC: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1905),

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458. 27. Andrew Jackson, Second Annual Message to Congress, December 6, 1830. In J. D. Richardson (ed.), A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1902, Vol. 2. (Washington, DC: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1905), 519. 28. Samuel G. Heiskell and John Scrier, Andrew Jackson and Early Tennessee History. (Nashville: Ambrose Publishing, 1920), 219. 29. Worchester v. Georgia, 31, U.S. 515 (1832). 30. The United States National Park Service, Trail of Tears National Historic Trail. Retrieved on May 18, 2008 from www.nps.gov/archive/trte/TRTE/history.htm.

II THE FOUNDING ERA

5 The Social Sciences and The Other

tend to focus on the late 1800s and early 1900s as the “founding era” of the field. It was a time period when rapidly changing social, political, and economic forces led to significant changes in society. The conceptualization of management and political processes helped frame means by which the state would be developed and had an effect on The Other in a political and administrative context. This era was one that was shaped by several trends, including increasing rates of immigration, rapid urbanization, discourse on strategies for post–Civil War redevelopment, and growing economic disparities that would affect how individuals involved in framing the field would conceptualize The Other. Central were critical stages in the evolution of the social sciences. The period became one of critical reflection for the emergent social sciences; such reflection triggered new ways of knowing and shaped the realities of individuals engaged in framing the foundations of thought within a field emerging to explore the management of the political and administrative elements of a society. The fields that are frequently viewed as providing the core of these sciences—particularly the areas of economics, sociology, and political science—experienced a stage of development that shaped foundations of knowledge about society as a whole and the role of The Other within the larger society. This chapter examines the early years of the evolution of these three areas of the social sciences. With each of these fields, I explore processes through which The Other was conceptualized, thus providing a foundation for the longer-term development of policy guided by findings from within the social sciences.

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In each case, it is important to consider that the social sciences during the founding era were largely influenced by natural science paradigms for obtaining knowledge about the larger society. Natural science comprehensions of motion, difference, and composition were rapidly transferred to frame strategies for understanding the social world. The natural sciences also influenced the social sciences by providing the foundations for challenging theological authority as a foundation for knowledge. Specifically, Darwin’s Origin of Species and Descent of Man framed discussions that explored approaches to humankind’s emergence that differed from those found in biblical interpretations. As importantly, the natural sciences demonstrated that traditional grounds of authority in framing conceptualizations of reality could be challenged. Ultimately, this era was one during which various experts emerged with bases of their knowledge first grounded in natural science foundations, and later in the nascent realms of the social sciences, which in turn provided a basis for perceiving notions of Truth, particularly as related to different groupings of people in a broader context.

Economics During the late 1800s, political economy, the primary antecedent of the field of economics, witnessed competition between a number of paradigms in Europe and America. In the United States, the field of political economy was intertwined in much of the university-based intellectual discourse. Many of the faculty members who taught courses lacked training in the field, and many lacked sufficient interest in it to explore it as a particular field of study and scholarly activity. In an 1876 North American Review article titled “Economic Science in America,” Harvard scholar Charles Dunbar argued that there was a need to advance more of a theory of political economy in the United States. Dunbar examined the course of development of the field of economics in the United States and pointed to the fact that, historically, individuals such as Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and others had been engaged in framing a discourse on economic principles in the United States. He lamented the fact that, in his opinion, the abilities of political leaders to engage in comprehending a science of economics had waned. In 1885, following a meeting of the American Historical Association in Saratoga Springs, New York, Richard Ely, a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University, gathered several scholars who were increasingly concerned about a number of social and economic conditions emerging in the United States at

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the time. Of particular concern to this group was the impact of the depression of 1893–1896, which brought with it numerous challenges related to the economic stability of the nation, many of which were evident in the growing number of strikes looming in various workplaces and industrial settings. According to Ely and many of the scholars he gathered, the field of political economy was unable to address many of these challenges, and scientific approaches for examining many of the economic questions that underscored the crises needed to be developed. In their view, the field of political economy was focused on solely promoting laissez faire approaches to handling many of the issues of the day and not to finding solutions for addressing many of the pressing problems. Ely and his colleagues believed that an intellectual framework had to be developed to address the challenges of the time. The laissez faire approach, particularly when it came to matters such as the role of business in society, did not excite many of the emergent scholars at the time. The intellectual development of Ely and several of the other younger scholars who had gathered in Saratoga had occurred in German universities where they were able to gain an appreciation of economics as a value-neutral science. This experience led Ely and others to return from Germany with what they believed was a more practical and scientific message for the field of economics than the field, taught as political economy in the United States, encouraged. As Ely reflected, Some of us felt that men who thought as we did were denied the right to exist scientifically, and this denial we believed to proceed from certain older men able to exercise a very large influence over thought, particularly thought in university circles. Very soon we felt that we had won our battle so far as the right to exist scientifically was concerned, and our pugnacious temper rapidly fell, certainly to below the boiling point.1

The interest in scientific foundations of knowledge provided a basis for the emergence of several approaches to developing economic processes. One paradigm that grew as a result of the interest in scientific thinking in the field was marginalism. Marginal economics, originally described in the work of Alfred Marshall in his Principles of Economics (1895), became the primary paradigm in the field of economics during the early progressive years. Perceived as more analytic, logically rigorous, and distant from philosophical assumptions, marginalism helped to provide a foundation for developing methodologies for calculating value. The influence of statistics and questions of valuation that underscored much of marginalism helped to shape a framework for the realm of economic demography, which used demographic factors to develop profiles of economic changes

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and elements of the population. A central figure within this area was Walter Willcox, who served as a professor of economics at Cornell and as a statistician for the U.S. Census Bureau from 1899 to 1931. Willcox was also active in the American Economic Association and the American Statistical Association. Willcox was able to shape the early research agendas of the American Economic Association and the American Statistical Association and in turn help promote opportunities for researchers using approaches in economic demography to understand various groups. Of interest to several of the scholars mentored by Willcox, particularly Frederick Hoffman, Joseph Tillinghast, and Alfred Holt Stone, were questions related to African Americans and their role in society. Stone, who became part of the American Economic Association’s Committee to Investigate the Negroes, was engaged in several investigations on the status of African Americans in society. In one article titled The Mulatto Factor in the Race Problem, published in the Atlantic Monthly, he noted, When free from white or mulatto influence the negro is of a contented, happy disposition. He is docile, tractable, and unambitious, with but few wants, and those easily satisfied. He inclines to idleness, and though having a tendency to the commission of petty crimes is not malicious, and rarely cherishes hatred.2

Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies of The American Negro, published in 1896 by The American Economic Association, argued that African Americans had been on a downward spiral since the period of emancipation. He noted, The tendency of the race has been downward. This tendency if unchecked must in the end, lead to a still greater mortality, a lesser degree of economic and social efficiency, a lower standard of nurture and a diminishing excess of births over deaths. A combination of these traits and tendencies must in the end cause the extinction of the race.3

Hoffman’s analysis of factors related to black mortality became a prized source for antiblack writers for many years and helped convince many insurance companies, including Prudential Insurance where Hoffman worked, that they should deny coverage to all blacks on the account that race by itself constituted an unacceptable actuarial risk. Tillinghast cast his The Negro in Africa and America (1902) as an attempt to wrestle with the challenge of heterogeneity in American society. Published by the American Economic Association twenty years after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, his work reflects questions related to the obstacles of assimilating the African American population as one of the primary challenges facing the

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United States in its need to ensure “some homogeneity of citizenship.”4 He noted, By excluding the Chinese we have avoided one threatening phase of heterogeneity. But unfortunately no African exclusion act was passed in the days when such action might have delivered us from the black peril, consequently, the homogeneity of our national society, especially in one great section, is dangerously broken. Our nine millions of negroes to-day constitute an ethnic group, so distinct from the dominant race, that we are threatened with inability to assimilate them.5

Tillinghast’s work, which he argued was an attempt to “get a thorough understanding of Negro character,” presented his interpretations of a group that he referred to as the “nation’s ward.” He argued that such an understanding cannot be separated from an understanding of the places, particularly in West Africa, from where African Americans came.6 Thus, Tillinghast traced many of the pathologies he observed to cultures and traditions in West Africa and not as a byproduct of slavery. In the introduction to Tillinghast’s work, Walter Willcox provided his support for Tillinghast’s position by noting: The rapidity with which an uncivilized people may be lifted, or may lift themselves, to the plane of an advanced civilization is still undetermined. To realize that many characteristics of the American Negro are part of his inheritance from Africa, and were bred into the race there through long generations, may perhaps strengthen the patience and forbearance of those who seek to expedite his progress.7

Willcox’s perspective on African Americans can also be found in his own writings, in which he too provided a framework for conceptualizing African Americans. In 1900, Willcox observed that “the Negroes will become, as they are now becoming, a steadily smaller proportion of the population. . . .the race will follow the fate of the Indians, that the great majority will disappear before the whites, and that the remnant found capable of elevation to the level of the white man’s civilization will be merged and lost in the lower classes of the whites, leaving almost no trace to mark their former existence.” Willcox argued that blacks would succumb to the effects of “disease, vice, and profound discouragement.”8 That Willcox served in a vital administrative role developing the 1880 Census raises questions about the methodology and assumptions underlying Census procedures in the late 1800s and early 1900s, particularly as the Census defined and counted the African American population during the time.

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That the American Economic Association published the work of Stone, Hoffman, and Tillinghast raises numerous questions about how this critical entity in the field of the social sciences viewed African Americans as The Other in American society. Specifically, their work also raises a number of questions about the emergent field of economic demography, as a subfield within economics and its depictions of groups of people, particularly when such groups of people consist of societal Others.

The Rise of Sociology Sociology was the second area of the social sciences that went through a critical stage of development in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and in turn framed perspectives on The Other within Progressive Era discourse. The notion of laissez faire, particularly as influenced by the work of Herbert Spencer, played a critical role in framing the dynamics of the field. Much of Spencer’s writing stemmed from several concerns that he developed as a result of changing dynamics within British society, including a concern about what he saw as an emerging role for the welfare state, a growing working class—with what he perceived as an increasingly militant means of articulating its concerns—and a civil service whose growth about which he found himself increasingly concerned. To Spencer, these shifts represented a movement toward collectivism rather than individualism, which he viewed as paramount. The movement toward widespread support of weaker members of a society by the collective, he argued, created numerous challenges: Besides an habitual neglect of the fact that the quality of a society is physically lowered by the artificial preservation of its feeblest members, there is an habitual neglect of the fact that the quality of a society is lowered morally and intellectually by the artificial preservation of those who are least able to take care of themselves. . . . Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good, is an extreme cruelty. It is a deliberate storing-up of miseries for future generations. There is no greater curse to prosperity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles and idlers and criminals. To aid the bad in multiplying is, in effect, the same as maliciously providing for our descendents a multitude of enemies.9

The most prominent advocate of Spencer’s notions in the United States, particularly individualism and competition between various groups, was William Graham Sumner, a professor at Yale University. In his 1906 book Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals, Sumner argued that evolution was governed by natural se-

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lection, and that in human society selection resulted from the industrial process, the struggle of classes, and from national warfare. It was Sumner’s What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883), however, that described his perspectives on different groups and classes within society and helped to shape his perspective on the role of the individual in relation to The Other. Sumner based much of his argument on his understanding of our inherited civil liberty as resulting in laws and institutions aimed at supporting one’s own welfare. As he noted, Every man and woman in society has one big duty. That is, to take care of his or her own self. This is a social duty. . . . The common notion, however, seems to be that one has a duty to society, as a special and separate thing, and that this duty consists in considering and deciding what other people ought to do.10

The primary intellectual adversary to the concept of individualism promoted by Spencer and Sumner was Lester Ward. Trained in the natural sciences and serving as an employee with the federal government, Ward took issue with Sumner and Spencer’s laissez faire approach to conceptualizing humankind’s relation with the larger environment. In 1883, the same year that Sumner’s What Social Classes Owe to Each Other was published, Ward published his Dynamic Sociology, in which he argued that human nature was purposive and enabled humankind to direct its own course of progress. Whereas Sumner and Spencer argued that humankind would either adapt to the environmental situation for survival or find themselves extinct, Ward argued that man was the master and not the subject of nature. “Progress,” according to him, “is not the subject but the master of nature, and that all progress is achieved by the conscious exercise of that mastery over the impersonal and chaotic forces of nature.”11 According to Ward, while the environment transforms animals, man transforms the environment. While Ward articulated the notion that humans could impact their social environment, Edward A. Ross provided a perspective on means of controlling the environment. Between 1896 and 1897, Ross published a series of articles in the American Journal of Sociology in which he identified various cultural factors that facilitated social order. By 1901, as a result of further research into factors underscoring social order, Ross was able to publish his work in a more expanded version in the book Social Control (1901). Ross argued that the notion of social control was part of a subset of the field of sociology—which he referred to as social psychology. Social psychology was in turn divided into two areas, social ascendancy and individual ascendancy. The concept of social ascendancy suggests that a society molds an individual’s feelings and desires into the needs of a group. Such shaping is the result of social influence and social control. Ross argues that social control is

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one of the ways that a society preserves its existence, noting, “The conduct it frowns upon is that which in the long run hurts it; the conduct it smiled upon is that which in the long run helps it.”12 The 1917 meeting of the American Sociological Society focused on the concept of social control, and courses in the emerging field of sociology were designed around Ross’s central concepts. Numerous Progressive Era leaders, including Theodore Roosevelt and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., viewed Ross’s book as a guide to social betterment. Moreover, Ross’s advocacy of control helped determine the roles of social groups in various patterns of control. While Ross’s work on social control might by itself be perceived as describing processes enacted within societies, his work on social control cannot be separated entirely from some of his perspectives on various groups of Others. In the conclusion of Social Control, Ross points out strategies for using race psychology to “adopt measures of control.” Dividing Europeans into Aryan and Celto-Slav people, he suggests different ways of socially controlling such groups of people. He notes that the Aryans are “best controlled through their self assertion and pride.”13 As he observes: They are guided by love of fame, by personal ideals and collective valuations. With them honor and self-respect are the mainsprings of right action. Of an inward-looking, self-analyzing bent, in contrast to the more outward-looking, sensuous peoples of the South, they can be reached by such illusions as “moral law,” “conscience,” and “duty,” which install the reflecting self in the judgment seat of the soul.14

In comparison, the people of southern Europe he describes as being less individualistic, and more gregarious and dependent. They prefer the farm village to the isolated homestead. They are more amenable to early impressions. They are patient and tenacious. They bow to authorities and feel the prestige of the past. Emotional and artistic in temperament, they are readily impressed by ceremony. Hence, these people are reached through their sensibilities.15

Ross’s work also can’t be separated from his other writings, which in turn further demonstrated his perspectives on groups of Others during the early 1900s. During an annual address before the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 1901, entitled “The Causes of Race Superiority,” Ross examined differences between races of people and patterns of one race gaining dominance over another. Laden with notions of superiority or inferiority of various racial groups in relation to one another, Ross’s speech ultimately uses the phrase “race suicide,” to warn members of what he deems “superior races” to the impact that large numbers of “inferior races” will have upon their presence in a society. As Ross argues,

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The higher race quietly and unmurmuringly eliminates itself rather than endure individually the bitter competition it has failed to ward off from itself by collective action. The working classes gradually delay marriage and restrict the size of the family as the opportunities hitherto reserved for their children are eagerly snapped up by the numerous progeny of the foreigner. The prudent, self respecting natives first cease to expand, and then, as the struggle for existence grows sterner and the outlook for their children darker, they fail to recruit even their own numbers. It is probably the visible narrowing of the circle of opportunity through the infiltration of Irish and French Canadians that has brought so low the native birth-rate in New England.16

Such perspectives on race and difference in Ross’s work underscored some of his inquiry into enacted processes for maintaining or controlling the social order, particularly as related to groups about whom he and other early sociologists framed constructions as part of the nascent field of American sociology.

Political Science Political science is the third foundation of the social sciences that emerged in the founding years of the field of public administration, and like economics and sociology it helped to shape notions of the political/administrative state and the state’s role in relationship to The Other. Much of the thinking in the realm of American political science at the time was driven by the work of individuals involved in Reconstruction-era development. An influence on the emerging field of political science was the question of the role of Reconstruction on the evolution of the field. An intellectual framework was beginning to build to discredit many of the advances that had been made during the era of Reconstruction. In 1902, John Burguess, founding dean of Columbia University’s School of Political Science, argued in his book Reconstruction and the Constitution that the U.S. government could have taken one of two routes to handle post–Civil War reconciliation and reconstruction. The first route, which he argued was the route actually chosen, was to place “political power in the hands of the newly emancipated.” The second route, which he argued would have been the preferable option, was to place southern districts under territorial civic governments that would have remained in place “until the white race in those districts should have sufficiently recovered from its temporary disloyalty to the Union to be intrusted again with the powers of Commonwealth local government.” 17 Burguess also argued that the early twentieth century—a time of great engagement in international endeavors—was a critical era in the United States

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and that lessons from Reconstruction should be considered within the scope of U.S. activities abroad: And now that the United States has embarked in imperial enterprises, under the direction of the Republican party, the great Northern party, the North is learning everyday by valuable experience that there are vast differences between the races, and that it is the white man’s mission, his duty and his right, to hold the reigns of political power in his own hands for the civilization of the world and the welfare of mankind.18

Among other scholars with negative impressions of Reconstruction was a political scientist whose career would soon take a political turn: Woodrow Wilson. In his 1893 book Division and Reunion, Wilson wrote at length of the problems that surfaced with Reconstruction: Its practical operation was of course revolutionary in its effects upon the southern governments. The most influential white men were excluded from voting for the delegates who were to compose the constitutional conventions, while the negroes were all admitted to enrollment. Unscrupulous adventurers appeared to act as the leaders of the inexperienced blacks in taking possession, first of the conventions, and afterwards of the state governments; and in the States where the negroes were most numerous, or their leaders most shrewd and unprincipled, an extraordinary carnival of public crime set in under the forms of law. Negro majorities gained complete control of the state governments, or, rather, negroes constituted the legislative majorities and submitted to the unrestrained authority of small and masterful groups of white men whom the instinct of plunder had drawn from the North. Taxes were multiplied, whose proceeds went for the most part into the pockets of these fellows and their confederates among the negroes. Enormous masses of debt were piled up, by processes both legal and fraudulent, and most of the money borrowed reached the same destination.19

In a 1901 article for The Atlantic Monthly, Wilson articulated to a greater degree what he viewed as the limits of the Reconstruction era and its processes of political and administrative inclusion: A extraordinary and very perilous state of affairs had been created in the South by the sudden and absolute emancipation of the negroes, and was not strange that southern legislatures should deem it necessary to take extraordinary steps to guard against the manifest and pressing dangers which entailed. Here was a vast “laboring, landless, homeless class,” once slaves, now free; unpracticed in liberty, unschooled in self-control; never sobered by the discipline of self support, never established in any habit of prudence; excited by a freedom that they do not understand, exalted by false hopes; bewildered and without leaders, yet insolent and

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aggressive; sick of work covetous of pleasure—a host of dusky children untimely put out of school.20

In addition to questions focusing on Reconstruction, the emergent field of political science found itself being shaped by debates on means of understanding dilemmas within society. In 1903, The American Political Science Association (APSA) was founded, partially as a result of growing tension between historians and political scientists, as a growing number of political scientists looked for means of transforming the study of their discipline into an independent field. Serving as the organization’s first president, Frank Goodnow called for studying political systems in a way that encouraged an emphasis on “what ought to be” versus “what is.”21 Increasingly, the emergent field found itself with advocates who called for using scientific approaches to conceptualizing the field. Johns Hopkins professor Henry Jones Ford served as one such advocate. In 1905, at a meeting of the APSA, Ford argued for conducting political science in a way that would “supply general principles for the guidance of statecraft.”22 In his opinion, much of the process of statecraft depended on political whims—“impressions received from accidents of development.” As he observed of political trends at the time, “Technical skills and knowledge in history, economics, and jurisprudence are appreciated and employed by statesmen, but the idea of determining state policy upon scientific principles has no place in practical politics.”23 From Ford’s perspective, integrating such specialized knowledge into political processes was critical. Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who served as an early president of APSA, was another advocate for this role of scientific realism (versus historic realism). According to Lowell, progress would come from compiling, arranging, and classifying data, using statistics, and performing comparative analyses of existing conditions. Lowell severed the Progressives’ program of historical realism and placed realism only in a present context.24 Thus the foundations for conceptualizations of The Other within the field of political science were established. The field would focus on statistical processes, focusing on present conditions versus facilitating an appreciation of historic circumstances related to the evolution of the political administrative state and all of its constituencies.

Conclusions The late 1800s and early 1900s were defining years for the social sciences— particularly in those areas that would in time provide foundations for the

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policy and administrative fields. Many of the methods and theoretical underpinnings during the era helped to underscore a growing language and discourse for framing discussions in the political and administrative state of The Other. As we reflect on the epistemologies that emerged during the Progressive Era, particularly in relation to shaping images of groups of people, growing expertise increasingly framed discussion related to The Other. Strategies for knowing and the conceptual frameworks that underscored such means of knowing ultimately impacted political and administrative processes for thinking about and responding to The Other. Current scholars and students in economics, sociology, and political science, as well as in the interdisciplinary areas supported by these fields, may want to reflect on the conceptualization processes and strategies that built notions of Otherness within their disciplines. How some of these processes in turn influenced discourse within political and administrative circles is part of where we will now turn our attention.

Notes 1. Richard Ely, Papers and Discussions of the Twenty-Second Annual Meeting: Being the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Founding of the Association. American Economic Association Quarterly, Third Series, 11 (1910): 1, 69–70. 2. Alfred H. Stone. The Mulatto Factor in the Race Problem. The Atlantic Monthly, 91 (1903): 660. 3. Frederick Hoffman, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro. (New York: Macmillan, 1896), 176. 4. Joseph A. Tillinghast, The Negro In Africa and America. (New York: American Economic Association, 1902), 1. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Walter Wilcox, Race Problems in the South: Report of the Proceedings of the First Annual Conference Held under the Auspices of the Southern Society for the Promotion of the Study of Race Conditions and Problems in the South. (Richmond, VA: B. F. Johnson Publishing Company, 1900), 152. 9. Herbert Spencer, Study of Sociology. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1961 [1873]), 313. 10. William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1920 [1883]), 113. 11. Lester Ward, Dynamic Sociology. (New York: Appleton, 1883), xviii. 12. Edward Ross, Social Control. (New York: Macmillan, 1901), 67. 13. Ibid., 440.

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14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Edward A. Ross, The Causes of Race Superiority. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 18 (1901): 67–89. 17. John Burguess, Reconstruction and the Constitution, 1866–1876. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902), viii. 18. Ibid., ix. 19. Woodrow Wilson, Division and Reunion. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1893), 268–96. 20. Woodrow Wilson, Reconstruction in the Southern States. The Atlantic Monthly, 87 (1901) 519: 1–15. 21. Dorothy Ross, The Origins of the American Social Science. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 287. 22. Henry J. Ford, The Scope of Political Science. Proceedings of the American Political Science Association, 2 (1905): 198–206. 23. Ibid. 24. Ross, 293.

6 The African American Male as The Other

CCUSED OF MURDERING THE THREE-AND-A-HALF-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER of a local police officer, Henry Smith fled the town of Paris, Texas, in late January of 1893. He was captured a few days later, about twenty miles north of the Arkansas border, and returned by train the next day to Paris. Upon his arrival, Smith was placed on a carnival float and led through town. As he traveled the route established for him, mobs of spectators gathered, jeering him along the way. Upon reaching his final destination, he was bound and spread on scaffolding high enough for many of the ten thousand people in the crowd that had rapidly amassed to see him. For the next hour, red-hot branding irons were thrust against his body and face, cottonseed hulls were then placed around him, kerosene was poured over him, and he was set ablaze. Following the fire, onlookers descended and sifted through the embers and Smith’s ashes for souvenirs. Henry Smith was one of the more than three thousand people lynched in the United States between 1889 and 1918. The vast majority of these individuals were African American, and of those, most were men. During these years, newspapers across the country ran headlines and often brief stories about the hangings, shootings, burnings, and torture that took place at the hands of mobs aiming to implement their own form of local justice. Some local papers even ran announcements of when and where a lynching was scheduled to take place. Families would occasionally bring small children to watch the events and it was not beyond attendees to cut off black victims’ fingers, toes, ears, or genitalia as prizes to take home with themselves.

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Sadly, throughout this era, administrative and political systems did little to respond to the brutal murders of many of these U.S. citizens who were lynched. Police chiefs would sometimes attempt to limit lynch mobs’ access to people accused of crimes; more often than not, however, the resistance to mobs provided by the “protecting officer” was minimal. At times, public officials directly endorsed the lynchings as a means of ensuring both local “justice” and as a strategy for intimidating members of local African American communities. In 1889, for example, Judge John S. Candler noted to an African American man convicted of fraud, “It would be a great blessing to this country if someone would lynch you.”1 The discourse that underscored Candler’s position as well as the discourse underscoring the lack of action by political and administrative actors around the issue of lynching represented a degree of political and administrative ambivalence and in some cases political and administrative hostility. Often, not aimed at the perpertrators of the crimes of the era, the ambivalence and hostility was frequently focused at the victims of the lynchings. Political and administrative ambivalence might best describe the challenge of lynching as it surfaced within American society in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Such ambivalence may have been the result of a lack of desire by many within positions to address the issue to do something about it. The ambivalence of individuals who were in critical positions to be able to do something about the issue was dramatically affected by the constructed image of the African American male as The Other during the Progressive and pre-Progressive eras. This chapter examines the framing of images of African Americans during that era, and explores how such imagery may have led to such political and administrative ambivalence around the incidents of lynching that occurred. I begin with an examination of what became a theme in much of the literature surrounding the “negro dilemma.” By casting African Americans within a framework of a “dilemma” both social scientists and writers in popular culture were suggesting that the African American presence was a problem to be solved, an Other to be devalued, and a group of quasi-citizens not to be protected from injustice.

Depictions of the “Negro Dilemma” In much of the literature of the Progressive Era, the images that coincided with Judge Candler’s views as well as the views of scores of others who could have been more proactive in their response to the issue of lynching, were often framed in the context of a “Negro dilemma” or the “Negro problem.” As seen

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in earlier chapters, literature in the emergent social sciences attempted to explore some of the solutions to this “problem.” Many published articles articulated a factor of inferiority in African Americans. In a 1902 Atlantic Monthly article, Andrew Sledd, a professor at Emory who would later serve as president of the University of Florida, noted that “the Negro question is a national one,” and one that “cannot be dealt with in any other way than the common, rational method applied to the commonest social and political problem.”2 Like other writers, Sledd’s perspective was grounded in basic notions of racial superiority at the time: The negro is lower in the scale of development than the white man. His inferiority is radical and inherent, a physiological and racial inequality that may, indeed, be modified by environment, but cannot be erased without the indefinite continuance of favorable surroundings and the lapse of indefinite time. But what the negro race may become in the remote future by process of development and selection is not a mater for present consideration. The fact remains that now the negro race is an inferior race.3

Some scholars, such as Kelly Miller, a faculty member at Howard University, argued that any indications of superiority of whites over blacks was merely a temporary phase in the nation’s development. As he countered in a 1909 Atlantic Monthly article titled The Ultimate Race Problem, That the relative concrete superiority of the European is due to the advantage of historical environment rather than to innate ethnic endowment, a careful study of the trend of social forces leaves little room to doubt. Temporary superiority of this or that breed of men is only a transient phase of human development. In the history of civilization the various races and nations rise and fall like the waves of the sea, each imparting an impulse to its successor, which pushes the process further and further forward.4

In 1900, Charles Carroll’s “The Negro A Beast” or “In the Image of God” reintroduced pre-Adamic biblical references, similar to those earlier articulated by Isaac La Peyrère, to argue that God created blacks on the fifth day of creation, the day before God created Adam. Carroll’s basic argument was that the blacks were of a higher order of animals—but animals, and not human, nonetheless: “All scientific investigation of the subject proves the Negro to be an ape; and that he simply stands at the head of the ape family, as the lion stands at the head of the cat family.”5 Carroll’s pre-Adamic argument was used to justify separate treatment as well as more brutal treatment of African Americans. His writings also helped to solidify for many of his readers an image of the African American male as

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The Other, which further helped to justify for many people the brutality, including lynchings, of this era. Carroll was not the only author who focused on differences between blacks and whites in the early 1900s. Thomas Dixon, a former student of political scholars Thomas Ely and Herbert Adams at Johns Hopkins, saw his writings rapidly increased in popularity as he actively focused on framing an image of southern blacks in the Reconstruction era. Through the various characters in his books, Dixon depicted key differences between whites and blacks and crafted an image of the black male as a threat to society. In the novel The Leopard’s Spots, he argued that black involvement in political activity would lead to political crisis. In Dixon’s opinion, blacks provided a historical problem for the nation and to white civilization, particularly in the South. In several of his books, Dixon romanticized members of the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan by making them the heroes of his work. In The Leopard’s Spots, for example, he wrote that this Invisible Empire of White Robed Anglo-Saxon Knights was simply the old answer of organized manhood to organized crime. Its purpose was to bring order out of chaos, protect the weak and defenceless, the widows and orphans of brave men who had died for their country, to drive from power the thieves who were robbing the people, redeem the commonwealth from infamy, and reestablish civilization.6

The first printing of 15,000 copies of The Leopard’s Spots quickly sold out and subsequent printings continued to sell out at record paces. According to Dixon, Reconstruction had transformed the black from “chattel to be bought and sold into a possible beast to be feared and guarded.”7 Dixon’s most popular novel, The Clansmen, which first appeared in 1905, provided a direct attack against African Americans in the broader society. He presented an image of the black male as a “half child, half animal, the sprout of impulse, whim, and conceit . . . a being who, left to his will, roams at night and sleeps in the day, whose speech knows no word of love, whose passions, once aroused, are as the fury of the tiger.” Later in describing a rape committed by Gus, one of the black characters in the story, of a young white virgin, Dixon builds upon the image of a beast by noting: “A single tiger spring, and the black claws of the beast sank into the soft white throat.”8 The film version of The Clansman, completed in 1915 and renamed The Birth of a Nation, presented in large screen format a romanticized version of the Klan during the era of Reconstruction and further labeled the African American male as The Other. The film depicted northern carpet baggers and freed slaves during the Reconstruction in ways that contributed to the major

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stereotype used to justify many lynchings: the black male as the potential rapist of the white female. One of the challenges The Birth of a Nation faced, because of the novelty of the medium of movies and its controversial subject matter, was building legitimacy. To help address this concern, Dixon called upon his fellow Johns Hopkins classmate, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, to arrange for a White House screening of the film for the presidential cabinet. Following the February 18, 1915 screening, Wilson remarked, “It is like writing history with lightning and my only regret is that it is all so true.”9 Several nights after the screening for Wilson’s cabinet, Dixon was able to screen the film for members of the Supreme Court and members of the Senate and House of Representatives at the O’Reilly Hotel in Washington, D.C. The status of these audiences helped created a sense of legitimacy for the film and for the characterizations the film depicted of the African American male as The Other.

Administrative and Political Reaction In the same year that Dixon’s stage version of The Clansman premiered, President Theodore Roosevelt stood before the U.S. Congress and presented his 1906 State of the Union Address. In it, Roosevelt reflected on the challenge of lynching in the United States, which had by then begun to draw national attention. “A great many white men are lynched, but the crime is particularly frequent in respect to black men,” Roosevelt noted in his speech, suggesting his general acknowledgment of the severity and frequency of lynching as an issue. The next sentence of the speech, however, reveals Roosevelt’s perspective on the African American male as The Other: “The greatest existing cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially by black men, of the hideous crime of rape—the most abominable in all categories of crimes, even worse than murder.” In the context of Roosevelt’s speech, the African American male had become the beast that Carroll and Dixon had depicted. Roosevelt’s articulation of why the issue of lynching was as great as it was correlates with one of the recorded justifications of why this phenomenon occurred during this era and why there was such little outcry about it from political and administrative arenas. It also serves as evidence that Roosevelt accepted many of the images of the African American male as The Other that were intertwined in the social science and popular literature of his era. The statements of executive leaders, however, were not the sole indication of political leaders’ lack of willingness to act on the brutal murders of scores of individuals—in particular African American men—through the lynching

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process. During the course of the twentieth century, the U.S. Congress witnessed the introduction of numerous antilynching bills. The handful of those that made it through the House of Representatives were blocked in the Senate through filibusters and other political means of diffusing the bills’ objectives of ensuring that the moral stain left by this trend of activity in American history ceased.

Conclusion In 2005, the U.S. Senate passed Senate Resolution 39, which officially apologized for its lack of institutional action on lynching throughout the twentieth century. Despite an acknowledgement by the Senate on its lack of action, during ongoing requests, no formal action had been undertaken by the Senate until then. The depiction of the African American as a beast, supported by the Carroll and Dixon’s imagery and endorsed by Wilson and Roosevelt, justified for many progressive thinkers, the complacency toward the challenges that African Americans, and particularly African American men, faced during the era. Questions of why such a lack of activity persisted both underscores potential questions of the era, and provides a foundation for questions related to imagery that persist related to the well-being of African American males in the present era. How such images correlate to modern ambivalence from political and administrative circles is a point worthy of further exploration.

Notes 1. A Judge Favors Lynching. Chicago Daily Tribune, May 25, 1899, 6. 2. Andrew Sledd, The Negro: Another View. The Atlantic Monthly, 90 (1902): 66. 3. Ibid. 4. Kelly Miller, The Ultimate Race Problem. The Atlantic Monthly, 103 (1909): 2–8. 5. Charles Carroll, The Negro a Beast: Or in the Image of God. (St. Louis, MO: American Book and Bible House, 1900), 87. 6. Thomas Dixon, The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden 1865–1900. (New York: Doubleday, Page, and Co., 1902). 7. Ibid., 5. 8. Thomas Dixon, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. (New York: Doubleday, Page, and Co., 1905), 304. 9. James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. (New York: Touchstone Books, 1996), 58.

7 The Immigrant as The Other—Part I

HEN I SET OUT ON MY TRAVELS, an honest New Yorker told me honestly that I would find that the Irish, the Catholic Irish, were at the bottom of it all everywhere,” noted Lincoln Steffens in the introduction to his The Shame of Cities. “The first city I went to was St. Louis, a German city. The next was Minneapolis, a Scandinavian city, with a leadership of New Englanders. Then came Pittsburgh, Scotch Presbyterian, and that was what my New York friend was. ‘Ah, but they are all foreign populations,’ I heard. The next city was Philadelphia, the purest American community of all, and the most hopeless. And after that came Chicago and New York, both mongrel-bred, but the one a triumph of reform, the other the best example of good government that I had seen. The ‘foreign element’ excuse is one of the hypocritical lies that saves us from the clear sight of ourselves.”1 Steffens’ work, a collection of articles that he had initially written for McClure’s magazine, explored the sources of corruption in the governance of several American cities. The collection of articles appeared during two major demographic transitions that took place during the early 1900s. The first was the United States’ transition from a rural to an urban nation between the years of 1880 and 1920; the second related to the increase in immigrants to the United States, the vast majority of whom were from southern, central, and eastern Europe. These two demographic shifts drove much of the discourse related to cities and the management of them. Through much of the emergent discussion about cities was a perception of The Other as an urban, often foreign-born dweller who was frequently a source of many of the societal challenges in urban contexts.

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This chapter examines the framing of the imagery of the immigrant as The Other in the late 1800s and early 1900s in U.S. society. I begin with an examination of immigration in the context of urban growth, a phenomenon that was characterized in much of the early 1900s. I then examine the evolution of three approaches to handling the issue of immigration that surfaced during this era: assimilation, restriction, and elimination. Each of these approaches to immigration had advocates in various echelons of U.S. society and involved various facets of the political and administrative systems. Each process was enabled largely by the framing of the images of the immigrant as The Other in American society.

Urbanization and the Growth of Cities Many of the industrial laborers moving into the urban centers in the early twentieth century were recent immigrants from nations in central, eastern, and southern Europe. Their arrival and integration into U.S. society was an important component of the emergent image of the urban Other. The influx of people from nations in this region of the world resulted in a backlash from many communities that had been in the United States for a number of years. Their concerns about growing numbers of new immigrants underscored a new debate: Was it in the national and local interest to have democratic principles in place if those principles meant political power in the hands of many of the new migrants? The ensuing debates about these immigrant groups helped to further drive many of the arguments for limiting immigrant entry into the United States. The Urban Dweller and The Immigrant For some administrative leaders, such as economist Francis Walker, who served as director of the 1880 Census and later served as president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a statistical imbalance existed between America’s earlier, primarily northern European settlers and new waves of immigrants arriving from southern and central Europe. In an 1896 article in The Atlantic Monthly titled “The Restriction of Immigration,” Walker presented several frameworks for exploring perspectives on the changing patterns of immigration. According to Walker, in the years after 1860 a number of trends that emerged had an impact on the makeup of the newer immigrant groups. Part of Walker’s concern was grounded in the work of Frederick Jackson Turner, who had warned about an exhaustion of free lands in the western United States; which he predicted would change the makeup of immigrant

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communities in the United States. According to Turner, the United States would find itself facing a change in the stock of immigrants, from the older group who had the sense of independence and moved into these expanding areas, to the newer groups, who would not have the same sense of rugged independence and thus would find themselves in congested cities. The newer immigrant Walker depicted was of a person of cheaper stock than the immigrant of the past. This perception was based partially on his view of the immigrant of the past as one who had come up with more entrepreneurial means for getting to the United States than those individuals who arrived in later years: Fifty, even thirty years ago, there was a rightful presumption regarding the average immigrant that he was among the most enterprising, thrifty, alert, adventurous, and courageous of the community from which he came. It required no small energy, prudence, forethought, and pains to conduct the inquiries related to his migration, to accumulate the necessary means, and to find his way across the Atlantic. Today the presumption is completely reversed. So thoroughly has the continent of Europe been crossed by railways, so effectively has the business of emigration there been exploited, so much have the rates of railroad fares and ocean passage been reduced, that it is now among the least thrifty and prosperous members of any European community that the emigration agent finds his best recruiting ground.2

In several cases, Walker used this notion of American exceptionalism to argue against the increase of immigrants during the Progressive Era. For nearly two generations, great numbers of persons utterly unable to earn their living, by reason of one or another form of physical or mental disability, and others who were, from widely different causes, unfit to be members of any decent community, were admitted to our ports without challenge or question . . . . The question to-day is, not of preventing the wards of our almshouses, our insane asylums, and our jails from being stuffed to repletion by new arrivals from Europe; but of protecting the American rates of wages, the American standard of living, and the quality of American citizenship from degradation through the tumultuous access of vast throngs of ignorant and brutalized peasantry from countries of eastern and southern Europe.3

Several images began to surface regarding various immigrant groups and helped to underscore the numerous concerns being articulated about them. One person who greatly contributed to this process was an immigrant himself, the Danish-born photographer Jacob Riis. In his most famous work, How the Other Half Lives, Riis provided depictions, in photographs and words, of several of the immigrant communities in New York. While much of Riis’ purpose

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in writing the book was to draw attention to the conditions in which many of New York’s poor lived, the book also provided a description for its readers of several of the ethnic and immigrant communities. Several chapters in Riis’ book focus and build on popular stereotypes of specific immigrant communities. Thus, readers encounter the “thrift” that Riis argues is a core component of the Jewish quarters, where he argues, “Money is their God.”4 Riis calls Italian immigrants a “picturesque, if not very tidy” element that “promptly reproduces conditions of destitution and disorder which, set in the frame-work of Mediterranean exuberance are the delight of the artist, but in a matter of fact American community, becomes its danger and reproach.”5 Riis’ depictions of various communities of immigrants were not unique. In his Old World in The New (1914), for example, sociologist E. A. Ross described various immigrant groups, and like many other writers at the time, made connections between social ills and the immigrants. Of particular concern to Ross were immigrants from southern, central, and eastern Europe. An observation about groups coming from the Mediterranean regions of Europe provides an example of Ross’ perspectives: That the Mediterranean peoples are morally below the races of northern Europe is as certain as any social fact. Even when they were dirty, ferocious barbarians, these blondes were truth-tellers. Be it pride or awkwardness or lack of imagination or fair-play sense, something has held them back from the nimble lying of the southern races. Immigration officials find that the different peoples are as day and night in point of veracity, and report vast trouble in extracting the truth from certain brunet nationalities.6

Ross even identified differences between people of the same nationality and some of the perceived social impact of such differences. For example, in noting differences between groups of Italians, he said, I have yet to meet an observer who does not rate the North Italian among us as more intelligent, reliable, and progressive than the South Italian. We know from statistics that he is less turbulent, less criminal, less transient; he earns more, rises higher, and acquires citizenship sooner. Yet only a fifth of our Italians are from the North. It is the backward and benighted provinces from Naples to Sicily that send us the flood of “gross little aliens” who gave Henry James, on revisiting Boston, the melancholy vision “of a huge applied sponge—a sponge saturated with the foreign mixture and passed over almost everything I remembered that might still have recovered.”7

In many instances, links between immigrants and crime began to surface in social and political discourse, as the immigrant became The Other. In 1892,

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Rutherford B. Hayes, who by then had completed his tenure as U.S. president, explored the link between crime and rising numbers of immigrants in a speech before the National Prison Association: With all that the law and voluntary societies have done for the improvement of criminal jurisprudence in the United States why do we not see greater and better results? My reply is that among our people of American birth and parentage a careful reading of the statistics for the past generation will show that crime has largely diminished and is still decreasing strength from the appalling catalog of crime in our country all the lawbreaking to the immigration of recent years, and the claims of prison reform United States will be amply vindicated. The crimes of Europe are laid at our doors.8

The inclination to link a “criminal type” and immigrant groups was partially supported by the work of Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso. In the 1870s, Lombroso studied sixty-six skulls of lawbreakers from throughout Italy in an attempt to find common characteristics of criminals. By studying living criminals too, he began to build various typologies and argued that, through various physical characteristics, it was possible to identify a criminal. In the first edition of his Criminal Man (1876), he noted, Thieves are notable for their expressive faces and manual dexterity, small wandering eyes that are often oblique in form, thick and close eyebrows, distorted or squashed noses, thin beards and hair, and sloping foreheads. Like rapists, they often have jug ears. Rapists, however, nearly always have sparkling eyes, delicate features, and swollen lips and eyelids. Most of them are frail; some of them are hunchbacked.9

The examinations of the physical elements of criminals enabled Lombroso to promote a new “science” of criminology, which was based largely on physical characteristics. His field of science promoted the idea that many people who are criminals are born criminals. The Immigrant Radical Local and global incidents increasingly affected how immigrant groups were perceived and contributed to their status as The Other. In the late 1800s, triggered largely by the economic depressions of the 1870s, the United States experienced a number of labor strikes throughout the nation. In the eyes of many of the nonparticipants of those strikes, the people who were often behind them were from various immigrant communities. In May of 1886, a gathering in Chicago’s Haymarket Square helped to expand this concept of the immigrant as the radical Other. Shortly after police

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responded to a call regarding a gathering of protestors in the square, a bomb exploded, killing several police and bystanders. Although police were unable to identify the bomber, six immigrants were sentenced to death for the bombing. The emerging image of the immigrant as the foreign radical was further exacerbated in September of 1901 when Leon Czolgasz, an American-born anarchist of Russian-Polish descent, fatally shot President McKinley. During his confession, Czolgasz noted the influence of Emma Goldman, the Russianborn leader of the anarchist movement in the United States, on his thinking. Czolgasz’s admission of the impact of Goldman’s work on his thinking, despite Goldman’s claim of not knowing who Czolgasz was, ultimately led to calls for her deportation as well as the further solidification of an imagery of the immigrant radical in the media and political discussions.

Responses to Immigration Several responses to the incoming numbers of immigrants, and the depicted problems they brought to U.S. society, eventually emerged. Strategies for Responding to Immigration: Assimilation Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play The Melting Pot provided a common language for the development of the discourse around immigration responses. The play focused on the experiences of David Quixano, a Jewish immigrant who lost much of his family to the Russian pogroms. Throughout the play, Quixano argues that the United States is a land of universal brotherhood where ultimately the divisions between different groups of people would soon disappear. One of the primary contributions of Zangwill’s work was its application of what ultimately became a widely used metaphor, that of the United States as a melting pot, to refer to the concept of assimilation in the United States. Institutionally, support for the assimilationist approach was enacted by the work of Jayne Addams at Hull House and others involved with the settlement house movement and what became known as the Liberal Progressive approach. Their strategy was to build a process of assimilation that was based partially on the initial encouragement residential segregation, with the goal of gradually engaging members of the immigrant communities into various elements of American society. Much of the approach of the liberal progressives was based on a cosmopolitan view of American society where there would be an emergent notion of cultural systems merging with one another.

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Strategies for Responding to Immigration: Restriction The second of the responses to increasing immigration came in the form of attempts to slow immigration. In 1894, the Immigration Restriction League was formed in New England by Charles Warren, Robert Ward, and Prescott Hall, all recent graduates of Harvard who were concerned about the rising number of immigrants entering the United States. The group eventually included such figures as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Madison Grant, and Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell. The Immigration Restriction League sought to identify means of limiting the number of immigrants, particularly from nations in central, eastern, and southern Europe who came to the United States. Restrictionist approaches to immigration initially emerged from concerns on the West Coast stemming from Chinese labor that had been imported to work on the development of the railroads and in other low-paid, manual jobs. In time, however, the displacement of local sources of labor by the incoming Chinese bred resentment from many non-Chinese working class laborers. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed to address growing concerns about the growth of the number of Chinese laborers. The act suspended the influx of Chinese laborers into the United States and designated anyone who was responsible for bringing Chinese laborers into the United States guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by a fine and the possibility of imprisonment. The Immigration Law of 1891 continued work of immigration reform begun by the 1882 act, by placing control of immigration under the Treasury Department’s Office of the Superintendent of Immigration. Immigration inspectors working in the office were placed at major points of entry in the United States to screen the various immigrants attempting to enter the country. The law also placed part of the responsibility for screening on the shoulders of the companies that transported Europeans to the United States by compelling steamship companies to carry back to Europe all passengers rejected by U.S. inspectors. In 1907, Congress formed the U.S. Immigration Commission, also known as the Dillingham Commission. This commission, chaired by Vermont Republican Senator William Paul Dillingham, served to examine numerous questions related to patterns of immigration. Over the next four years, The Dillingham Commission gathered extensive research on immigration. The commission’s final report, released in 1911, comprised forty-two volumes and examined various components of immigration. Much of the work in the report helped to advance scientifically grounded theories of the superiority of some groups over others; in time, these theories became part of the legislative discourse and helped to shape subsequent immigration policy.

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The Dillingham Commission report paved the way for the passage of the Johnson Reed Act of 1924 (also known as the Immigration Quota Act of 1924). The 1924 Johnson-Reed bill established the framework on immigration issues that would shape much of the foundation for development of immigration processes until the mid 1960s, when the policies established were ultimately altered to include groups excluded by the 1924 act. Strategies for Responding to Immigration: Elimination In 1883, Francis Galton’s Inquiries into Human Faculty and Development introduced the term “eugenics” into a discourse that would eventually frame some approaches to dealing with the immigrant Other. Galton’s work, grounded partially in his interpretation of Lamarck and influenced by the emergence of Mendelian genetics helped to rapidly shape an interest in the field of eugenics as a mechanism for addressing various social issues pertaining to The Other. Ultimately, many of the principles Galton articulated and explored shaped theories on the racial basis of intelligence, developments in sociological understandings, and some approaches to discussions on genetic engineering. These approaches provided the third response to immigration discussed within numerous arenas in which political, administrative, and civic leaders of the early twentieth century were engaged. Throughout many of the upper echelons of U.S. society, the concept of eugenics grew in popularity. One eugenics proponent was Charles Davenport, a researcher who proposed a biological research station in Cold Springs Harbor, New York, to analyze factors of race change. Davenport was able to secure the support of numerous individuals who viewed his work as an important contribution to the scientific and social arenas in the United States. Expressing his support for the notion of the research center, Theodore Roosevelt noted to Davenport, “Someday we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty of the good citizen of the right type, is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world.”10 In the introduction to Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), Henry Osborne, president of the American Museum of Natural History and a leading supporter of Davenport and other eugenicists, noted, If I were asked: What is the greatest danger which threatens the American Republic to-day? I would certainly reply: The gradual dying out among our people of those hereditary traits through which the principles of our religious, political, and social foundations were laid down in their insidious replacement by traits of less noble character.11

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Grant’s perspective coincided with that of Osborne and provided a solution to addressing the issue of the immigrant Other through the eugenics approach of breeding out what were viewed as the weaker groups within American society. This perspective of breeding out what were perceived as the negative traits became referred to as negative eugenics. As Grant noted, It must be borne in mind that the specializations which characterize the higher races are of relatively recent development, are highly unstable and when mixed with generalized or primitive characters tend to disappear. Whether we like to admit it or not, the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting to the more ancient, generalized and lower type. The cross between a white and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.12

For Grant, and for several other prominent individuals of the era, part of the strategy for some of this differentiation lay in exploring means of increasing the prevalence of the “stronger” classes within society and eliminating the weaker classes of society. This approach of breeding-in positive traits became known as positive eugenics. Grant saw processes of selection through strategies incorporating positive and negative eugenics as a means of ensuring that his perceived stronger-race type flourished and developed within U.S. society. He argued: A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit—in other words, social failures—would solve the whole question in a century, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educated and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him or else future generations will be cursed with an ever increasing load of victims of misguided sentimentalism. This is a practical, merciful and inevitable solution of the whole problem and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased and the insane and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.13

While the concepts of positive and negative eugenics advocated by Grant and Osborne may be perceived as extreme approaches to addressing what may have been perceived in some circles as problems related to immigration, their support from individuals within key political and administrative positions cannot be completely ignored. Support for notions advocated by Roosevelt, suggest that these approaches were supported by individuals at many of the higher levels of leadership and governance within the United States.

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Conclusion The changing discourse related to immigration in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought with it a number of cautions related to the perception of the immigrant as The Other. It also brought a number of strategies within systems—both enacted and explored—for addressing what was increasingly viewed as an immigrant problem. The three approaches at the forefront of the explorations reflected this concept of the immigrant Other as a problem for the shaping of institutions and laws for response. The resulting approaches—assimilation, restriction and elimination—each received varying levels of support in different echelons of U.S. society— including political and administrative realms at the time. In several cases, as we will explore, some of the arguments and strategies in the early 1900s for dealing with the immigrant as The Other, found themselves resurfacing during later stages of immigrant debates.

Notes 1. Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of Cities. (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004), 2–3. 2. Francis A. Walker, The Restriction of Immigration. The Atlantic Monthly, 77 (1896): 822–29. 3. Ibid. 4. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890). 5. Ibid., 48. 6. Edward A. Ross, The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration. (New York: The Century Co., 1914), 293. 7. Ibid., 101. 8. Arthur MacDonald, Abnormal Man: Being Essays on Education and Crime and Related Subjects, with Digests of Literature and a Bibliography. (Wilson, DC: Government Printing Office, 1893), 189. 9. Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006 [1876]), 51. 10. Donald K. Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968), 121. 11. Henry Osbourne, Introduction. In Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race. (New York: Scribner’s, 1916), ix. 12. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race. (New York: Scribner’s, 1916), 17–18. 13. Ibid., 50.

III TRANSITIONAL CONCERNS

8 Housing The Other

LORRAINE HANSBERRY’S 1959 PLAY A Raisin in the Sun opened to wide acclaim in New York, the young playwright was interviewed by the oral historian Studs Terkel. During the interview, Terkel observed that Hansberry’s play had a happy ending for its central characters, the Younger family, to which Hansberry later replied, “If he thinks that’s a happy ending I invite him to come and live in one of the communities where the Youngers are going.”1 The experiences of the Younger family were a representation of the experiences of many African Americans living on Chicago’s south side in the 1940s and 1950s. They were among the thousands of African American families in this segregated city—the result of the Second Great Migration, the largest migration of people in U.S. history, during which southern economic and social factors drove large numbers of African Americans to northern industrial communities. Instead of a climate welcoming those who sought jobs in the industrial North, many African American migrants found conditions that slowed their progress toward the opportunities they had widely anticipated. Although they had hoped their movement north would allow them to live in a much freer society, they found themselves still in a segregated reality. While not displaying the visible signs of the Jim Crow South, the North still presented patterns of segregation that had an impact on the lives of those who migrated, their children, and the generations that followed. For the vast majority of those who moved north during this time, the industrialized cities to which they

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migrated—while far more welcoming than those to which many of them were accustomed—were still not as welcoming as many had hoped. The migration trend and patterns of settlement helped to create growing African American communities in northern cities. As a result of numerous policy decisions, these places became—as many people involved in the political and administrative processes recognized—communities of a marginalized Other. Much of the movement northward occurred at a time of housing policy reformulation on the federal, state, and local levels. Often, newer policies reinforced segregation patterns and helped contribute to cycles of poverty that continued in many communities for the rest of the century. In time, the urban spaces that came to represent the environment of The Other in the minds of the broader public also represented urban America’s deepest challenges. This chapter examines the interplay between housing policy development, during the 1950s and 1960s, largely in response to the northern migration, and the role of conceptualization processes as related to The Other. The question in many political and administrative circles of the era focused on issues of how to address the major inflow of members of this group. Ultimately, I contend that there were two major impacts of this era and how political and administrative systems ultimately chose to respond. The shorter term impact was that processes of reinforced segregation took root and ultimately helped contribute to cycles of poverty that continued in many communities for the rest of the century. The longer term impact has been that of an immediate policy context of reinforced segregation, in which many communities have wrestled with social and economic conditions that are still the center of numerous policy conversations. I begin my examination of housing policy vis-à-vis an image of The Other with an emphasis upon many of the basic demographic changes that occurred during this era. I continue with an examination of the policy questions and issues that surfaced during the era, particularly as federal housing policy became central to emergent notions of the post–New Deal era concept of the social contract. To help contextualize the impact of these factors of African American northern migration and shifts in housing policy, I examine changes in the city of Chicago, a city which experienced an influx of southern African American migrants to a degree that was largely unmatched by other metropolitan areas. Chicago also witnessed the development of policies related to public housing that in time were influenced by numerous special interests from throughout the city. The more organized of these interests advocated for policies that ultimately served to reinforce and galvanize various

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segregated housing patterns—ultimately creating a geographic context in which to situate The Other.

The Northern Migration—Basic Demographic Changes Between 1940 and 1970, thousands of African Americans moved from the rural South to the urban, industrialized North. This period, which is frequently referred to as the Second Northern Migration, was the result of various regional factors. The impact of race on public policy was not as well recognized in the industrial North as it had been in the segregated South; as a result, many migrants saw northern cities as free of the racial incivility produced by Jim Crow–era policies. For many of the migrants, the notion of leaving behind continuous reminders of their place in a segregated South for the opportunities they perceived in the North had great appeal. In the 1920s, the mechanized cotton picker was invented. In a few short years, the impact of the mechanization of cotton picking in many rural southern communities led to shrinking demand for agrarian labor in the South and to the development of strategies for southern communities that were not as dependent upon the sharecropping processes. The decline in cotton industry jobs led to a tight labor market for blacks and to increasing hostility over white and black competition for jobs. The industrial North was perceived as a home for many factories looking to employ people at higher wages than African Americans were accustomed to in the South. Most northern cities absorbed the resultant influx of new migrants but saw a rapid change in their basic demographics. This change came with a number of challenging questions: Where would these individuals moving into the cities be housed? What was the role of local agencies versus state or federal entities in providing housing? Changes in Housing Policy In 1932, as part of the New Deal era, the U.S. government became involved in housing on a widespread scale with the Emergency Relief and Construction Act and its Reconstruction Finance Corporation. This entity made loans to private corporations to develop low-income housing. Two years later, the 1934 Housing Act was passed to help make housing and mortgages more affordable for Americans. It created two entities to help facilitate this: the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC). The organizations assisted in the development of a private

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mortgage industry to make home ownership accessible to the middle class by insuring mortgages. The Wagner Housing Act of 1937 enabled government to expand its reach into the housing arena by creating federal funding for projects that would be owned and operated by local housing authorities and by facilitating the development of housing for lower-income individuals. It also helped spur the development of the urban renewal program. While the Second World War placed a hold on most federal housing activity, the postwar years witnessed rapid housing development and the further shaping of housing policy. Part of the force behind housing policy was a desire to be able to provide housing for World War II veterans, a goal that was largely supported by the 1944 authorization of the Veterans Administration’s Home Loan Program, which guaranteed millions of loans for single-family and mobile homes. Coupled with a postwar boom in housing construction, VA loans helped lead to a tremendous level of growth in postwar home construction and suburban development. The 1949 and 1954 Federal Housing Acts The 1949 Federal Housing Act shaped the development of housing issues and settlement patterns, particularly those related to urban settings. The act was the result of several years of congressional negotiations on strategies for further engaging the federal government in the development of housing policy. The act’s first three titles are particularly central to the formation of notions of The Other in an urban policy context. Title One of the act financed slum clearance and urban redevelopment programs. Such redevelopment was to be arranged by local renewal authorities appointed by and responsible to local government. Who was to be cleared out of an area designated as a slum and where the people would ultimately be resettled, then, was often a decision made by local government, and members of the African American communities were often disproportionately affected by such decisions. Title Two of the act increased authorization for Federal Housing Administration mortgage insurance, which enabled many families who had not considered living in suburban settings to be able to do so. The vast majority of families who became able to explore moving out of the city and into suburban areas were white. Title Three of the act established a housing construction goal for the federal government. From 1949 to 1955, according to guidelines established in the act, the federal government would build more than 800,000 new public housing units. Lingering questions that followed the implementation of the

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act from that point forward included where such housing would be built and who would live in it. The 1954 Housing Act further developed the provisions of the 1949 act. One key element, for which the private real estate industry lobbied extensively, was income eligibility requirements. When those requirements were put into place, many potentially economically stable residents were shifted into public housing from communities in which they may have fallen just below the new financial guidelines. Housing Issues in Chicago Chicago was the setting for much of the demographic change that resulted from the northern migration. Census data note the impact of the demographic change in the city. In 1940, Chicago’s African American population was at 277,731 residents. Ten years later, in 1950, that number reached 492,265. By 1960, that number reached 812,000, and by 1970, slightly more than 1.1 million African Americans lived in the city. As Lemann (1992) observed, “At one point 2,200 black people were moving to Chicago every week.”2 In December of 1946, attempts to move a few African American veterans and their families into the Chicago Housing Authority’s Airport Homes complex, which had been constructed largely for World War II veterans, were met with resistance by local white residents. As the African American families initially attempted to move in, a crowd of 200 residents, primarily housewives, met the newcomers by hurling racial slurs and stones at them. Within a few hours, the crowd grew to an estimated 2,000 people and became more violent. A number of people surrounded and tipped over a car owned by Kenneth Kennedy, one of the African American veterans. Police were able to rescue Kennedy, but not before he and two other African American veterans were pursued by members of the crowd. To help calm the situation, the police placed two hundred officers on duty in the housing complex.3 Several nights following the riots at the Airport Homes, hundreds of demonstrators gathered to protest the admission of seven African American families into the Fernwood Park housing project. On the first night of the protests, more than 400 demonstrators were stopped by a police force of 500 officers. On the second and third nights, more than 1,000 police responded to reports that several thousand potential demonstrators were in the area. A pattern of resistance to the movement of black families into white communities was established. Over time, many groups in certain white communities opposed to having black residents move in became more organized in their mechanisms for shaping their opposition. Protests—some violent— would continue, and African Americans moving into the area were made

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keenly aware that many of their new neighbors did not welcome them into the neighborhoods. In 1948, the Illinois legislature passed a bill giving Chicago’s city council the power to approve the Housing Authority’s construction sites for new homes, thus taking control of key public housing issues out of the hands of the Housing Authority. Leading the Chicago Housing Authority at the time was Robert Taylor, who in 1943 had been appointed as the first African American chairman of the agency. Following the passage of the 1949 Federal Housing Act, Taylor approached Mayor Kennelly for the sites that had been approved for the first ten thousand units. Kennelly had already developed a list that had included seven sites, all situated in white neighborhoods throughout the city. Kennelly shared Taylor’s list with the council. Shortly after hearings about the various proposed sites, white neighborhood associations on the city’s south side mobilized, in some instances chartering buses to bring community members to protest at city council and Housing Authority meetings. For most of 1950, an active debate over the sites dominated Chicago politics. The resulting compromise, referred to as the Duffy-Lancaster compromise— for the two council members who were central in facilitating the arrangement— was skewed largely to the disadvantage of many of the city’s African American families. Duffy-Lancaster called for the displacement of more than 12,000 families, the vast majority of them African American, as part of a slum-clearance initiative. Only forty-seven new units were to be added in predominantly African American neighborhoods. Several months of debate between the Housing Authority and the city council resulted in a lengthy stalemate over the issue of the placements of housing units. In June 1950, with no sign of change in the position of the city council, and no sign of support from the U.S. Housing Administration or the Truman Administration, the commissioners of the Chicago Housing Authority voted to approve the Duffy-Lancaster agreement. As a result, the Housing Authority undertook a massive slum-clearance effort. The communities most frequently cleared were the African American working-class enclaves that had emerged in Chicago at the time, limiting the further growth of those communities and requiring the relocation of the displaced families. Among those who voted for the compromise was Taylor, who saw no feasible, alternate resolution to the stalemate. In November 1950, Taylor resigned from the board of the Chicago Housing Authority, primarily because of the compromise; his absence meant the housing authority’s loss of one of its most vocal advocates for equitable housing policies. It also meant that the authority was able to implement a plan that resulted in one of the more densely concentrated patterns of housing in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century.

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The Rise of Concentrated Housing—Situating The Other During his first year in office, Mayor Richard Daley committed to building more than 15,000 new housing units over the next decade. In rapid succession, Chicago witnessed the development of housing that resulted in the concentration of much of its rapidly growing African American population. Over time, many of the names of these emergent housing complexes became synonymous with urban public housing. In 1957, the Henry Horner Homes, consisting of seven buildings of seven stories and two of fifteen stories, opened. They were followed the next year by Stateway Gardens. In 1962, Cabrini Green opened. That same year saw the opening of what would become recognized as one of the largest public housing projects in the world, the Robert Taylor Homes. Consisting of twenty-eight nearly identical sixteen-story buildings, the Taylor homes, which incorporated Stateway Gardens, became home to nearly 40,000 low-income African Americans. In Chicago, enacted housing policy became a means of situating the urban African American Other. In cities across the northern United States, policies of concentrated housing emerged, frequently as holding grounds for resettling communities. For the remainder of the century, many of these housing complexes became increasingly depicted as breeding grounds for nested poverty, crime, and many of the social challenges often associated with urban America in the latter twentieth century. It was these areas—separated from the rest of the society by various political and administrative systems—that became known as the setting for many of the members of the politically and administratively unknown Other.

Conclusion In 1992, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced its Hope VI program, which aimed to enable the mobility of individuals and families who had been situated in public housing, and were often segregated from communities of different socioeconomic and/or racial backgrounds, to move. In time, the program came to incorporate strategies focused on resident empowerment, inner-city revitalization, and new urbanism. Hope VI represented the implementation of housing-policy approaches that suggested a movement away from the strategy of dense concentration that came to be embodied by the Robert Taylor Homes, Cabrini Green, and many other complexes in Chicago and other urban communities throughout the 1960s and 1970s. With a policy movement toward mixed-use facilities and strategies for desegregating housing that resulted from Hope VI, policymakers

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indicated a willingness to use a more integrated approach for engaging societal Others in the economic, political, and social framework of their neighborhoods. Various administrative and political actors had recognized that because of their historical responsibility for having shaped many policies that caused the segregation that helped reinforce the image of the urban Other, they were responsible for the implementation of policies and procedures to reverse such patterns of creating a segregated urban Other.

Notes 1. Robert Nemiroff, Introduction. In Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun. (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 11. 2. Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America. (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 70. 3. Negro Couple Flee Jeers at Project Homes. Chicago Daily Tribune, December 8, 1946, 42.

9 The War on Poverty

RESIDENT JOHNSON’S DECLARATION

in his 1964 State of the Union Address of an “unconditional war on poverty in America,” indicated the reemergence of an awareness of poverty in the United States in the 1960s. This reemergence surfaced after a period of general consensus during the late 1940s and 1950s that the United States had achieved a level of general prosperity throughout the nation. This awareness of poverty and the resulting War on Poverty challenged notions of such prosperity; despite what many policymakers wanted to believe, thousands of people in the cities and rural areas of America went to bed hungry each night, lived in inadequate housing, and lacked the resources to be productive members of a broader American society. The squalid conditions in which thousands of people in rural and urban America lived challenged political and, later, administrative systems to respond to the reality that, while many people were benefiting from the postwar economic boom, far too many others were not. Images of who the poor were went through a rapid shift in the perspectives of many people during this time period. In the late 1950s, the poor were, from a policy standpoint, a largely invisible group. Politicians and administrative decision-makers saw the affluence of the United States, the possibilities of further economic growth, looming issues related to civil rights, and cold-war concerns as the primary factors driving the political and administrative debates of the era. By the early 1960s, policymakers had reawakened to poverty in America. How this reawakening occurred, and the process through which

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the poor were conceptualized as a distinct group within policy discussions, affected numerous political and administrative agendas throughout the 1960s and beyond. This chapter examines the evolution of notions of poverty and the poor during this era. From a context preceding the War on Poverty, when a lack of a public image of the poor correlated with the lack of a comprehensive dialogue related to the poor, to an image of the poor framed within a rural or an urban context, I explore the relationship between the discourse of who the poor were and the shaping of both the institutions and the institutional responses to groups of the poor as they were conceptualized. I begin with a buildup to the War on Poverty, and the reemergence of a concept of the poor within the public mindset. This reemergence was largely the result of the writings of social observers who used various academic or journalistic frameworks to paint images of who the poor were and their roles in society. I continue with the administrative and political response to the issue of poverty with an emphasis on reactions from both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. A major component of the ultimate response was the development of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, and the resulting Office of Economic Opportunity, which I examine as the policy foundation of the era. Underscoring much of the War on Poverty was a conversation in the social sciences, which I explore, that came about because of an evolving scientific language related to poverty. During the years of the War on Poverty, the image of the poor as The Other went through a dramatic shift—from images of impoverished whites living in Appalachia to one of urban African Americans. This shift in imagery ultimately resulted in the adaptation of very different responses to conditions of poverty. Much of this shift coincided with the urban unrest that many cities experienced during the late 1960s. Ultimately, such unrest provided a new imagery of the poor as The Other within an American context. I close with explorations of questions of policy prescriptions that emerged as the filter of race entered into this conceptualization of the poor as The Other, particularly given these shifts in images of who the poor were.

Setting the Stage: Envisioning the Poor Notions of prosperity surfaced in many areas of American society in the fifteen years following the Second World War. The nation concluded the war with a period of rapid economic expansion that helped to fuel consumer spending, job creation, and the development of an economic infrastructure that furthered postwar growth.

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In his 1958 book The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith observed that postwar confidence in market forces led many people to call for limited state intervention in addressing larger societal needs. Galbraith observed that the economic conditions in the United States and much of the industrialized world had transitioned from a time when many people assumed that the bulk of society consisted of the poor and a handful of society consisted of people with some wealth, to a time when a smaller proportion of the population was considered poor. This shift in income dynamics meant that the poor were increasingly ignored in this era of perceived prosperity. According to many people engaged in the public discourse, poverty had been alleviated as a result of the New Deal, the Second World War, and the period of postwar progress. According to Galbraith, the risk in assuming that the United States had settled into general economic progress was that there were large segments of the population who were not part of the increasing affluence and who were overlooked in discussions of national economic policy. Thus, as Galbraith observed, In the United States, the survival of poverty is remarkable. We ignore it because we share with all societies at all times the capacity for not seeing what we do not wish to see. Anciently this has enabled the nobleman to enjoy his dinner while remaining oblivious to the beggars around his door. In our own day, it enables us to travel in comfort by Harlem and into the lush precincts of midtown Manhattan. But while our failure to notice can be explained it cannot be excused.1

To help frame a better understanding of the dynamics of poverty, Galbraith suggested that there are two categories of poverty: case poverty and insular poverty. Case poverty is focused primarily on poverty at an individual level. In such instances, nearly everyone else coming from similar circumstances is able to address the economic challenges they encounter, but the individual confronts realities—whether health issues, dependencies, or family challenges— that inhibit that individual’s ability to surmount his or her challenges. Insular poverty by contrast was manifested itself as an “island” of poverty on which “everyone or nearly everyone is poor.” Many early poverty policies focused on insular poverty, examining the conditions through which larger segments of the population wrestled with the conditions of poverty. A few years before Galbraith’s work on affluence and poverty, anthropologist Oscar Lewis examined poverty as a subculture of a larger overarching societal culture. His studies of poverty across several different national and cultural settings led him to develop a conceptualization of poverty as an intergenerational phenomenon, which he referred to as a “culture of poverty.” According to Lewis, the culture of poverty is “an adaptation and a reaction of the poor to their marginal position in the class stratified individuated capitalistic society.”2

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Lewis’s concept was grounded largely in notions of social isolation, which he argued were part of a lack of participation of the poor in major societal institutions. Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1963) helped to further advance within the public mindset a notion of poverty in America. Harrington argued that mass poverty still existed in the United States, and that poverty was disappearing at a much slower rate than many people had assumed. Harrington’s goal was primarily to provide further witness to the existence and complexity of poverty in the United States. As he noted, There is, in short, a language of the poor, a psychology of the poor, a world view of the poor. To be impoverished is to be an internal alien, to grow up in a culture that is radically different from the one that dominates the society. The poor can be described statistically; they can be analyzed as a group. But they need a novelist as well as a sociologist if we are to see them. They need an American Dickens to record the smell and texture and quality of their lives. The cycles and trends, the massive forces, must be seen as affecting persons who talk and think differently.3

Harrington noted that he wanted his perspective to not interfere with his goal of bringing attention to the poor. To do so he provided accounts of the lives of various groups categorized as the poor in an attempt to bring to life what he viewed as a segment of society that was vanishing in the public consciousness. Harrington’s illustration of the worlds of the poor provided an overview of some of the complexities of poverty, focusing particularly on mental health, old age, race, and other factors that helped him draw the attention of various people involved in framing policy to poverty as an ongoing issue. While initially not a best seller, Harrington’s The Other America gained the attention of Dwight MacDonald, a reporter with the New Yorker magazine. In 1963, an article by MacDonald about poverty provided both a review of Harrington’s work and the work of others on poverty. It also provided an overview of poverty trends of the 1960s, which according to MacDonald coincided with a reawakening to issues of poverty. “For a long time now,” he observed, “almost everyone has assumed that because of the New Deal’s social legislation and more important—the prosperity we have enjoyed since 1940, mass poverty no longer exists in this country.” MacDonald’s essay on poverty, which focused largely on The Other America, provided an overview of the conditions of poverty present in many communities. MacDonald identified various components related to the debate on the issue; in particular, he focused on various notions related to categories of the poor in U.S. society in the early 1960s. His critique on the assumptions on poverty as well as his review of several books,

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including Harrington’s, helped to draw the attention of political and administrative decision-makers to matters of poverty in the United States.

Poverty Reenters the Political Discourse The 1960 presidential campaign season coincided with some of the early discussions of the role of poverty in society, and several of the candidates found themselves confronting the issue. To buffer some of Senator Hubert Humphrey’s momentum in the race for the Democratic nomination, Senator John Kennedy spent several days in rural Appalachia as part of the West Virginia primary. While there, he encountered conditions in various mining camps and communities in West Virginia. One promise Kennedy made to residents of the state, particularly those living in communities with high poverty rates, was that if he were elected president he would propose a program to deal with their high levels of unemployment within sixty days of the election. In early December 1960, less than thirty days after the 1960 election, and as a means of honoring his campaign pledges to the people in West Virginia, President-elect Kennedy appointed an eleven-member panel, headed by former senator Paul Douglas to draft a federal plan to address challenges in many of these economically depressed areas. In early July 1961, Kennedy received the Douglas Report from the committee and began to explore policy approaches to poverty. Illustrating the level of poverty in some areas of the country, The New York Times noted in the same article in which it reported the delivery of the Douglas Report that “[i]n West Virginia alone, in October, 281,000 people out of a total population of 1,800,000 depended upon surplus food in order to sustain life.”4 Despite the release of the Douglas report, the individuals and communities who hoped for a rapid response early in the Kennedy administration as a result of his early expression of interest on poverty as a policy priority found themselves disappointed. While several issues dominated much of Kennedy’s early years, poverty was not one of them. Despite the interest Kennedy expressed on the campaign trail and during the early part of his presidency, the early 1960s saw a limited sense of urgency related to poverty. In 1962, The Other America and MacDonald’s New Yorker article attracted the attention of the president and members of the administration to the issue of poverty. More importantly, however, the book and the article helped secure the interest of the press in the issue of poverty. That same year, Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame aired and depicted poverty among migrant farm workers. In October 1963, The New York Times published a series of articles on poverty among the many coal miners of Appalachia who had been displaced

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by increasing automation. The articles referred to the hidden poverty of the region, and drew the attention of Kennedy and others. In early November 1963, largely as a result of the influence of these various articles and books on poverty, Kennedy decided to make poverty alleviation a core component of his 1964 legislative agenda. While part of Kennedy’s decision to reengage in poverty policy can be attributed to the impact of the articles and books appearing on the issue of poverty, political considerations cannot be completely ignored. Kennedy knew that his 1964 legislative agenda would be examined in the course of his reelection campaign. He had committed to addressing poverty during the previous campaign cycle, and he knew he would need to revisit this issue should he desire to retain legitimacy among certain segments of the electorate, particularly those to whom he had committed in discussing a poverty agenda in the 1960 campaign. In November of 1963, Kennedy initiated several steps to begin the implementation of his antipoverty agenda. On November 13, he announced plans for an emergency program to ease hardship in eastern Kentucky and appointed Franklin Roosevelt Jr. to head up the initiative. On November 19, Kennedy asked Walter Heller, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, to develop a programmatic outline for a poverty program, which he promised to review shortly after Thanksgiving. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, prohibited the full implementation of an antipoverty agenda under his administration. It also prohibited Kennedy from being able to fully articulate a vision of who the beneficiaries of a policy agenda on poverty would be. At the time of Kennedy’s assassination, Heller and his team of advisers were still developing potential policy approaches to poverty.

Phase Two: President Johnson Assumes the War The day after he was sworn in as President, Lyndon Johnson met with Heller to discuss the Council of Economic Advisers’ poverty framework. Heller noted that poverty was a much larger issue than many policymakers at the time had understood and thus would need a more comprehensive policy approach than had been earlier anticipated. Following some of the notions advanced by Lewis, Heller suggested that poverty went further than economics and was grounded within the anthropological framework of the culture of poverty. According to Heller’s team, poverty resulted from sustained economic and social isolation and was sustained by isolation from the dominant economic and social system. As a result, the poor needed to have opportunities that would enable them to be less isolated and adopt new patterns of life.

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Several of the policy designers working with Heller were influenced by literature on social isolation and alienation surfacing during the 1950s and early 1960s. Robert Nisbet’s Quest for Community (1953), for example, provided several of them with an argument that people’s increasing dependence on the state had caused them to move away from potential community institutions to help solve local problems and maintain communal relationships. As a result, poverty approaches designed at the time focused on exploring potential institutional frameworks for antipoverty agendas. President Johnson’s worldview on poverty had been shaped partially from his encounters with rural poverty while a child in Texas. Later, as a member of Congress, representing, among others, the rural poor in Texas, Johnson’s familiarity with poverty from a public policy perspective deepened. For Johnson, the power of description was a critical element in the development of the antipoverty policies that were emerging at the time. The decision, for example, to call the antipoverty effort a war was made at the Johnson ranch during the Christmas holidays in 1963. In his memoirs, The Vantage Point (1971), Johnson reflected on the choice of terms: The title War on Poverty was decided on during those days at the Ranch. It had disadvantages. The military image carried with it connotations of victories and defeats that could prove misleading. But I wanted to rally the nation, to sound a call to arms which would stir people in the government, in private industry, and on the campuses to lend their talents to a massive effort to eliminate the evil.5

For Johnson, the concept of poverty was constructed from a perspective that required thinking about poverty as a force against which one battles. Johnson, however, realized that the dynamics related to poverty in the 1960s were not the same as the dynamics related to poverty in the 1920s. As he noted, During the Depression we had been concerned mainly with educated and trained people who had been temporarily dislocated by the sickness of the economy. The poverty of the 1960s, the paradoxical poverty in the midst of plenty, was of another breed. The economy was booming. Jobs were plentiful, but the unemployed were incapable of filling them. The most significant aspects of this new poverty, once the spotlight of attention was thrown on it, were the dismaying nature of its stubborn entrenchment and the total entrapment of its victims from one generation to the next.6

The Economic Opportunity Act Heller’s team, along with representatives from the Department of Labor, spent the following months drafting a policy initiative to address matters of poverty.

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Their approach was unique in the sense that it was not developed as a result of extensive pressure from a specific constituent base. Instead, it was the result of internal meetings among White House executive agency and staff. In March 1964, Congress received the proposed Economic Opportunity Act from the White House. Many of the programs recommended in the act focused on the development of policies to address poverty within urban settings versus poverty in rural settings. Part of the reason was a result of political calculation. Cities had a greater concentration of voters than rural areas, and many of the urban communities that would benefit from the framework proposed within the Economic Opportunity Act were communities that Johnson and his advisers saw as benefiting a Democratic political base. Another reason for the focus on urban poverty was what were emerging as the social dynamics of many cities. Increasingly during the early 1960s, the impact of the second northern migration had become visible in many urban settings. The concentrations of African Americans—many of whom had moved from rural southern areas—became visible. Tensions between groups of people in many of these cities were rising as the numbers of African American migrants increased but found themselves excluded from housing, labor, and social opportunities. President Johnson signed The Economic Opportunity Act into law on August 20, 1964. The final act had two major titles. The first title was focused on youth job training and employment programs, which many of the act’s designers viewed as critical to the process of poverty alleviation. The second title established a series of urban and rural community action programs. According to the legislation, these programs were meant to provide services, assistance, and other activities to assist with achieving a goal of poverty elimination strategies through employment opportunities and the improvement of conditions under which people live and work. These programs served as the institutional framework that Nisbet had earlier articulated. The act also stated that such programs were meant to be developed and administered with the “maximum feasible participation” of members of the groups served. The notion of maximum feasible participation and the focus on empowering community agencies had several effects. Federal resources were leveraged into various grassroots and community-based agencies, outside of the control of the local government. As a result, many local residents began to serve in key decision-making and managerial capacities in the various community action agencies, which engaged residents of target communities in a number of efforts aimed at building a support infrastructure and at leveraging federal resources into those communities.

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To many individuals in established power structures in various cities throughout the nation, empowering the local communities through the process of maximum feasibility participation was a threatening prospect, and in time various municipal leaders found themselves resisting efforts to direct activities related to the Office of Economic Opportunity, the agency created by the Economic Opportunity Act to coordinate the antipoverty efforts. The agency had the resources to create new programmatic opportunities for the poor, to distribute resources, and to bypass many of the local agencies that had been established in many cities under the direction of various municipalities or states. Resultant tensions between the agencies receiving federal support and the local state and municipal agencies placed the agency representatives and members of the community with whom they were engaged at times at odds with many of the municipal and state political and administrative agencies in their communities. Such alienation in time further shaped lines of conflict among local developers of programmatic responses to poverty, those providing resources from the federal level, and local communities.

Social Sciences, Scientific Rationalism and The Other—A Poverty Context The language through which conversations on poverty and the poor were framed shifted radically during the 1960s. At the beginning of that decade, questions of poverty were framed within the fields of anthropology, sociology, and economic theory. By the middle of the decade, marginal economics and scientific rationalism became the languages through which many of the conditions of the poor were discussed. This shift was driven by an increase in the postwar years of the role of scientific processes and rationalism in framing an understanding of policy concerns. This trend in turn impacted how the poor as a representation of The Other, was ultimately constructed. The shift was also driven by the development of a greater infrastructure for university-based policy research. The GI Bill increased the number of people attending universities and as a result increased the number of individuals who could frame the discourse on poverty from an academic perspective. The demand for degrees also increased the number of universities and departments within universities that could train people to work in social science research. As a result of demand for higher educational degrees during the era, there was an increase in both the number of universities and the number of researchers at many of these universities who were beginning to explore social science questions related to poverty, including definitions of who the poor were.

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Alongside the development of a human capital pool for poverty research grew an increase in government expenditures in social science research, with much of this expenditure going toward matters related to poverty. Increasingly, the Office of Economic Opportunity turned to the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison to implement its research agenda and engage in studies on matters of poverty. The university in turn assumed a role in shaping various analytical techniques related to the framing of poverty research agendas and was later complemented by the work of other research institutions that examined issues of poverty from an economic framework. Several of these institutions were part of a network of public policy schools that received substantial support from the Ford Foundation for the development of policy research grounded in rigorous economic methodologies. These institutions in turn aided in conceptualizing the poor within a framework influenced by rigorous economic models. On August 25, 1965, President Johnson met with his cabinet members and agency heads to introduce the Planning, Programming and Budgeting System (PPBS) into government agencies. This system was grounded in rational and economic approaches to the development, implementation, and evaluation of federal programs. As a result of PPBS, the poor could be placed into a framework in which components of their lives could be measured and analyzed. Ultimately, this helped to further contextualize the War on Poverty and the poor within economic discourse and scientific rationalism. The poor, then, for many people within the policymaking framework, had become faceless components of larger economic modeling processes grounded in technocratic approaches shaped by new methods that emerged from these new university-based policy networks. Concepts of poverty were being shaped in a marginalist economic context that permitted the assignment of value to patterns of life.

Moynihan and Reactions In 1965, a report from then–Assistant Secretary of Labor for Policy Daniel Patrick Moynihan titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, analyzed challenges facing African Americans in the United States. Central to the report was an argument that weakening family structure and underclass behavior underscored challenges encountered within the African American community. Moynihan argued that, within the African American community, a pattern of a matriarchal structure had evolved. Such a structure, he noted, was “out of line with the rest of the American society.” As a result, he argued, it “seriously

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retards the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.” He noted, There is, presumably, no special reason why a society in which males are dominant in family relationships is to be preferred to a matriarchial arrangement. However, it is clearly a disadvantage for a minority group to be operating on one principle, while the great majority of the population, and the one with the most advantages to begin with, is operating on another. This is the present situation of the Negro. Ours is a society which presumes male leadership in private and public affairs. The arrangements of society facilitate such leadership and reward it. A subculture, such as that of the Negro American, in which this is not the pattern, is placed at a distinct disadvantage.7

It did not take long for Moynihan’s analysis and recommendation to receive criticism for its assertion that the challenges faced within the African American community were within the family structure and not part of a wider institutional framework. At a presentation in New York, Martin Luther King Jr. noted his concerns about how challenges facing black families had been conceptualized in the report: The opportunity will be to deal fully rather than haphazardly with the problem as a whole—to see it as a social catastrophe and meet it as other disasters are met with an adequacy of resources. The danger will be that the problems will be attributed to innate Negro weakness used to justify neglect and rationalize oppression.8

James Farmer argued that the report was the “most serious threat to the ultimate freedom of American Negroes to appear in print in recent memory.”9 He noted that the report wasn’t about “the Negro family,” but was about “some Negro families.” He noted, By laying the primary blame for present day inequalities on the pathological condition of the Negro family and community, Moynihan has provided a massive academic cop-out for the white conscience and clearly implied that Negroes in this nation will never secure a substantial measure of freedom until we learn to behave ourselves and stop buying Cadillacs instead of bread.10

William Ryan, a Boston psychologist, criticized in The Nation the report’s depiction of African Americans. According to him, the report encouraged a form of subtle racism that he termed “Savage Discovery.” This perspective, which he warned against, advocated that weaknesses and limitations of African Americans were the cause of inequality between the races, not racism and discrimination that African Americans faced.11 In later writings, Ryan

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used the notion of “blaming the victim,” to describe the process of justifying inequality by finding defects in its victims. According to him, Blaming the victim depends on a very similar process of identification (carried out, to be sure, in the most kindly, philanthropic, and intellectual manner) whereby the victim of social problems is identified as strange, different—in other words, as a barbarian, a savage.12

Despite criticisms of Moynihan’s report, it did help frame a representation of the African American family with which both the social sciences and political and administrative decision-makers would have to contend. His image was one of the African American family as a family of The Other. The Urban Riots and The Other By the mid 1960s, northern urban communities were feeling the stress of rapid population growth resulting from the northern migration, a lack of jobs in the urban core, inadequate opportunities related to education and housing, and numerous other barriers that contributed to numerous tensions. At the center of much of the frustration was an African American community that, in addition to being concentrated in areas of substandard services and minimal economic access, were also registering complaints of brutality from overwhelmingly white police forces. Newark, New Jersey, became one example of many of these realities and a place where many of the institutions related to the War on Poverty intersected. Newark also became the center of a debate on urban renewal when the city began to implement a proposal to build a medical and dental college in the center of the city, which would require the removal of dozens of homes in the predominantly African American Central Ward. On the night of June 20, 1967, in a meeting at the city’s planning board, several speakers protested the city’s intention to use 150 acres in the heart of the Central Ward as the site for the state’s medical and dental college. Many of the community members attending saw this as a strategy for pushing the African American community to the city’s margins. These tensions were further developed by concerns that, despite promises to the contrary, Newark Mayor Hugh Addonizio did not provide opportunities for African Americans to participate in municipal employment or contracting efforts. On the evening of Wednesday, July 12, 1967, in the midst of rising tension related to police brutality and living conditions in the Central Ward, Newark cab driver John Smith was stopped by two Newark patrolmen for driving around two double-parked police cars. Different stories emerged about what

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happened next. The patrolmen claimed that Smith hurled insults at both officers when he was asked for his driver’s license and registration. Supposedly, according to the officers, Smith then struck one of the officers in the chest and the face before both patrolmen were able to subdue him and get him to the police station. Smith’s story differed. According to him, after being stopped and insulted by the police, he was taken to the city’s Fourth Precinct police district. Enroute to the precinct, he was punched several times by one of the arresting patrolmen. He was dragged from the patrol car into the precinct building, where the arresting officers and several other members of the police force continued to kick and beat him. Witnesses to Smith’s being taken into the Fourth Police District building were able to amass a crowd outside of the precinct. In time, these crowds grew. Demands from the crowd that Smith be taken to a hospital were honored after tensions further escalated. Records from the hospital indicated that Smith suffered from a fracture to a rib and damage to the skull. By the next day, much of Newark was in a condition of major civil unrest, as violence began to erupt between many of the residents and members of the police forces. By Friday of that week, mounting tensions led the governor to introduce several hundred state police and several thousand National Guardsmen into the city. Newark was only one of 150 cities that experienced civil unrest during the summer of 1967. Ranging from minor disturbances to major outbursts, riots had become part of the landscape of many of the summers of the 1960s. The images of the urban poor broadcast on the evening news and appearing in newspaper photographs across the nation were of African American angry mobs engaged in the destruction of urban communities. Newspaper reports added to the imagery of African Americans running rampant throughout many of the cities of urban America. A New York Times article on the Newark riots of 1967 reported, “Bands of Negroes broke from the crowd as the fires raged to race through the business district. They smashed windows and scooped up whatever loot they could find.”13 An article on the Watts Riots a few years earlier had reported, “Gangs of Negroes appeared last night in various parts of Los Angeles County, up to 20 miles from the riot scene.”14 These reports painted a picture of swarms of poor African Americans destroying their own property and posing an immediate threat to people and property in nearby settings. Such reports helped to make these the new faces of the poor. For people reading newspaper reports or watching the news, images of national guardsmen, young black males looting various stores, fires erupting—all painted a picture of the poor urban Other in a very different light from the poor Appalachian white about whom the poverty discourse of the early 1960s was initiated.

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In response to the urban riots, President Johnson appointed a Commission on Civil Disorders, chaired by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, on July 27, 1967. Johnson tasked the Kerner Commission with examining in detail why the riots had occurred and what strategies could prevent them from happening again. In his address to the nation announcing the appointment of the Commission, Johnson noted that there was a need to launch an attack on the conditions that led to the riots: “All of us know what those conditions are: ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs. We should attack these conditions—not because we are frightened by conflict, but because we are fired by conscience. We should attack them because there is simply no other way to achieve a decent and orderly society in America. . . . ”15 In its final report, released in late February of 1968, the commission pointed to the challenges of urban poverty. “Our nation is moving toward two societies,” noted the commission, “one black, one white—separate and unequal.”16 The report detailed the institutional challenges related to the conditions in many urban communities and spoke directly to forms of institutionalized racism that had evolved within U.S. society. As the commission noted, What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions maintained it, and white society condones it.17

The Kerner Commission report helped to explain some of the complexity related to the riots; it made clear that numerous social, economic, and other factors had come together to create the social situations that in turn led to the riots. Many of these dynamics were related to race; many were related to economics. The urban rioter had developed from social and economic phenomena that were a product of the larger society; moreover, institutions and administrative decisions had directly and indirectly framed the processes that had created the urban rioter, who had also come to represent the poor urban dweller as The Other.

The War on Poverty—The Latter Years By 1967, the War on Poverty had lost a great deal of its political support. President Johnson began to frame his language pertaining to poverty efforts differently and he referred no longer to a war on poverty, but to a strategy related to poverty. Behind some of this shift were complaints about the impact that the community action agencies were having in many of the cities where there had been traditionally a strong democratic base. The empowerment of local

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residents had indeed led to a challenge of leveraging grassroots supports and infrastructure that in turn challenged many of the political bases. In 1973, President Nixon dismantled the Office of Economic Opportunity and its resultant institutional framework. Many of these changes came as several of the offices under the OEO were shifted to other divisions of the federal government. However, they also came in response to concerns that had surfaced and become embedded in the minds of many policymakers about the federal support that community action agencies were receiving. Moreover, the Appalachian poor—an image that had generated more sympathy from policymakers—had been replaced by an image that drew less sympathy from many in the political and administrative processes, that of the poor as the rioting urban African American. Thus, the closure of the OEO signaled the end of the formal institutional framework for the War on Poverty and a complete reformulation within the mindset of many individuals about who the poor were.

Conclusions The shifting image of the poor as The Other during the War on Poverty provides a case in positionality and power in constructive processes. In the late 1950s, only a small handful of people engaged in the policy process were willing to conceive that there was a reality of poverty in the United States. As the perceptions of who the poor were shifted, the level of support for programmatic responses to address the challenge of poverty in America changed and engaged a wider scope of individuals engaged in the policy arena. The Office of the President had a large degree of influence on the poverty discourse. The primary institution for the War on Poverty—The Office of Economic Opportunity—was imagined, designed, and implemented relatively quickly by policy designers within the White House and several key executive agencies, most of whom had limited personal experiences with poverty. Their understanding of who the poor were and of the underlying situations leading to poverty underscored the design of various antipoverty initiatives. As we reflect on those policy designers, it is critical to think through how their personal experiences and how their perceptions of poverty and the poor were constructed. As part of America’s wealthy elite, Kennedy’s worldview was one for which poverty was initially at the periphery; he knew little, if anything, about what it was to be poor. His campaign experiences in Appalachia helped to frame his specific image of who the poor were and of their needs. Johnson’s experience growing up in rural Texas enabled him firsthand to see the impact

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of rural poverty; thus, in several ways, the notion of poverty was much more real in Johnson’s worldview than in Kennedy’s. Very few of the individuals designing War on Poverty programs and policies had experienced life among the poor in America. The lack of firsthand experiences with poverty limited their ability to fully comprehend the lives and experiences of many of The Others for whom they were developing and implementing policies. To a degree, this represents one of the classic challenges faced by those individuals involved in political and administrative processes. Designers and implementers of policies have their constructed images of the subjects of their policies, and those images directly affect the policies they design. In the case of the War on Poverty, imagery of the poor and a select people’s perspectives on their needs influenced the development and implementation of poverty policies. The construction of The Other led to the development of new social science processes for explaining who The Other was and in time, the development of the institutions for responding to the needs of The Other.

Notes 1. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 296. 2. Oscar Lewis, La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York. (New York: Random House, 1966), 121. 3. Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States. (Baltimore: Penguin, 1963), 17. 4. Kennedy Pledges Jobless-Area Aid; Gets Panel Study. New York Times, January 2, 1961, 1. 5. Lyndon Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963–1969. (New York: Holt Reinhardt Langston, 1971), 74. 6. Ibid., 72. 7. Lee Rainwater and William Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy. (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1967), 75. 8. Ibid., 404. 9. Ibid., 411. 10. Ibid., 410–12. 11. Ibid., 458. 12. William Ryan, Blaming the Victim. (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 10. 13. Newark Mayor Calls in Guard as Riots Spread. New York Times, July 14, 1967, 1. 14. 2,000 Troops Enter Los Angeles on Third Day of Negro Rioting; 4 Die as Fires and Looting Grows; Youth Run Wild. New York Times, August 14, 1965, 1.

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15. Lyndon B. Johnson, The President’s Address to the Nation on Civil Disorders, July 27, 1967. Retrieved on May 18, 2008 from www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index .php?pid=28368&st=&st1=. 16. United States National Commission on Civil Disorders, Report of the National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968), 1. 17. Ibid., 2.

10 Educating The Other

ODAY, EDUCATION IS PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT FUNCTION of state and local governments,” noted Chief Justice Earl Warren in writing the opinion of the Court in Brown v. Board of Education.

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Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.1

Despite the fact that Warren’s opinion was articulated near the middle of the twentieth century, issues of inequality and opportunity in education persist at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The latter half of the twentieth century saw schools as the nesting grounds for a number of bitter debates at the community level. Many of the debates gave rise to group perceptions of one another. Many of these perceptions had—and sadly still

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have—an impact on the level of access students have to resources. They also have a resounding impact upon the roles that different students will have as they enter adulthood and identify the place that the larger society has created for them. My focus on issues pertaining to The Other in this chapter explores matters related to the desegregation of schools in the latter half of the twentieth century. The battle for such desegregation formed as a means for ensuring that students, regardless of race, had equal opportunities as they pursued their education. My exploration will focus specifically on one key case which brought to light many of the complexities of The Other as related to school desegregation during the 1960s and 1970s—the case of school busing in Boston. This case provides a lens for examining political and administrative roles as related to The Other in the realm of education. It illustrates the multiple interest groups that surface when matters of children’s education is one of the key factors being explored. It also illustrates how complex group dynamics are in discussions related to the intersection of education and race. I begin this examination of school desegregation and The Other with an evolving legal framework for desegregation, beginning with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. The decisions articulated in Brown represented a greater change in the representation of the doctrine of separate but equal that served as a foundation for educational policy as well as a point of departure for discussion since then. Next I examine the period of the mid 1970s, with an emphasis on education in the city of Boston and the implementation of a school busing plan as a court-imposed means for addressing matters of discrimination. I conclude with reflections on the impact of conceptualizations of The Other as both articulated and engaged in the Boston schools case as well as in the current environment related to schools and the access that children might have to equal levels of educational opportunity in them.

Cases in Desegregation Part of Homer Plessy’s legacy as a result of the Supreme Court’s 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson has been a context for initiating conversations on the issue of separate public facilities, including schools. Despite the administration of various educational districts in numerous states and localities throughout the nation, there has been a continued legacy of unequal and separate schools. In 1954, the Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that racially separate schools violated constitutional rights. The following

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year, the Court ordered that the desegregation of schools proceed with deliberate speed (Brown v. Board, 1955). The decisions served as the beginning of a series of cases that would transform the educational system in America and the images of students in communities responding to that transformation. In 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus declared, in direct violation of a federal court order, that African American students would not be permitted to enroll in Little Rock’s Central High School. In response, President Eisenhower ordered U.S. Army paratroopers to escort African American students into the school. Citing continued harassment of the students as justification, a federal judge agreed to postpone integration until 1960 to allow for a safer overall integration process. In little time, the NAACP appealed the federal judge’s order to the Supreme Court, which in turn ordered that integration in Little Rock proceed without delay. With a unanimous decision, the Court determined in the 1958 case of Cooper v. Aaron that initial desegregation could not be delayed because of intense local resistance, even if local officials said there was danger of violence. In the 1970 case of Swann v. Charlotte–Mecklenburg Board of Education, the Supreme Court upheld a ruling by a federal judge ordering that the enrollment in each of Charlotte’s schools be approximately 71 percent white and 29 percent African American. Students were to be bused between communities to obtain such ratios. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld this order and as a result established the notion of busing as a remedy for unconstitutional segregation. The 1973 case of Keyes v. School District No. 1, Denver, Colorado, brought the issue of desegregation to northern and western cities. When school authorities made a series of decisions that intensified segregation and rejected alternatives that would foster integration, this was sufficient proof of a violation of the standards set forth in the Brown decisions. In its decisions in these cases, the Supreme Court began to provide a legal framework for the development of educational access, particularly for groups of students who traditionally had been excluded from many of the preexisting educational systems. The emergence of cases related to desegregation in schools was felt in communities throughout the nation. In many instances, northern communities, which had avoided many of the earlier battles of the civil rights era, began to experience their own battles, particularly in matters of school desegregation. As home to the first public schools in the United States, as well as to one of the early free African American communities, Boston provided a unique setting in the discourse on race and education throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries.

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Boston and School Desegregation: An Early Framework As the birthplace of the common schools in the 1700s, and as an early home for an emergent community of freedmen and fugitive slaves, Boston found itself wrestling early in its history with questions of school integration. In the early 1800s, the African American community in Boston was able to convince the city to allow them to open a school for African American children, run by the Boston School Committee. By the mid 1840s, the small African American population in Boston was limited to only one of the city’s 117 primary schools. At that time, the African American community began to petition the school committee to close the sole school for African American children—the Smith Grammar School—and allow African American children to attend schools with white children. According to an assessment by the city, the Smith School’s classrooms were too small, it was long overdue for painting, and the equipment was shattered beyond use. In 1849, Benjamin Roberts, the father of five-year-old Sarah Roberts, decided to challenge Boston’s educational system after his daughter’s application to a white school had been rejected several times. The case of Roberts v. City of Boston was argued by abolitionist Charles Sumner on the grounds that Sarah’s not being permitted to attend any of the white schools violated her right to equality under the law as articulated in the Massachusetts State Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. As Sumner noted in the case, continued school segregation would “brand a whole race with the stigma of inferiority and degradation. . . . The separate school is not equivalent.”2 Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw ruled against Sumner and Roberts, declaring that both races benefited from racial segregation. According to Shaw, various community prejudices would probably prevail regardless of where students attended school, and that power to make determinations was vested with the school committee. As he noted in his ruling, The committee, apparently upon great deliberation, have come to the conclusion, that the good of both classes of schools will be best promoted, by maintaining the separate primary schools for colored and for white children, and we can perceive no ground to doubt, that this is the honest result of their experience and judgment.3

The ruling in the case had several effects. First, the court established a framework to which the Massachusetts legislature could respond, which it did in 1855 with the passage of a law outlawing school segregation. Second, it provided a foundation in the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson for the concept that separate could exist within a legal framework. Third, it established a

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historical legacy in Boston for examining questions of school equality and desegregation. Boston Racial/Ethnic Profile Aside from Boston’s early experiences with establishing schools—and desegregating them—an important foundation for some of the later challenges related to desegregation was being established in the development of several of the city’s ethnic and racial communities. Throughout much of the late 1800s, Boston saw rapid growth in its Irish population. With the growth of this group came increased Irish representation in Boston’s municipal politics and a shift of many of the members of the non-Irish white community into politics at the state level. In 1884, these dynamics became even more pronounced with the election of the city’s first Irish mayor and the further retreat of many non-Irish whites into state-level political and administrative roles. This division within Boston’s white community—between the city’s Anglo-Protestant community and its Irish-Catholic communities—established an important historical context for later battles related to schools and their desegregation. Boston Schools Desegregation: Twentieth Century Battles By the early 1960s, the Brown decisions spurred African American parents and community representatives in a number of cities to begin to examine the challenge of ensuring more equitable educational opportunities for all children, regardless of race. In Boston, much of this mobilization occurred in conjunction with the release of several reports on the conditions of schools. In 1962, for example, a team from Harvard University’s Divinity School noted that, of the thirty-five schools that enrolled 60 percent or more of the African American students at the time, twenty-seven had been built prior to 1914. The report further noted significant differences in expenditures in a number of areas for students in predominantly African American schools as compared to predominantly white schools. The observations noted in the Harvard report coincided with complaints from African American parents who began to share their concerns about conditions in the their children’s schools. Lukas’ examination of Boston in the 1960s and 1970s provides an overview of some of the accounts of practices in the schools: tales of children being beaten with the “rattan,” a thin bamboo whip still used then in Boston schools to discipline recalcitrant children; of overcrowding so severe that classes met in the damp basement, which stank of urine and coal dust,

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or in corners of the auditorium, where glee club rehearsals drowned out most of what their teachers were saying; of shattered windows, broken desks, threelegged chairs; of chronic shortages of pencils, chalk, and erasers; of outdated textbooks, often with covers ripped off, pages missing or obliterated by ink stains; of racial slurs directed by indifferent white teachers at the black pupils who made up 60 percent of the school; and even reports of one teacher whose classroom was segregated, whites seated in front and blacks in the rear.4

In 1963, the Boston NAACP held a meeting with members of the Boston School Committee to discuss school desegregation. Proponents of desegregation were met with an obstinate reaction from the school committee, particularly from the chair of the committee, Louise Day Hicks. For Hicks and the other members of the school committee, as well as many of the teachers and administrators, the schools were a place where a system of power and often patronage had evolved. Many of the teachers and administrators of Boston’s schools were Irish and part of a community that, stemming back to intergroup tensions in the 1880s, felt that it had been kept from opportunities by the power structure of Boston’s Protestant community. The schools were a place where Irish-American political control was perceived as a stronghold of power. Hicks and other members of the school board adamantly maintained that, despite claims to the contrary, the schools in Boston were not segregated. As Hicks noted in late June of 1963, I intend to give the NAACP every opportunity to discuss educational programs with the school committee . . . but I repeat what I have said several times before: segregation is not an educational program. The Boston School system is integrated, therefore it cannot be segregated.5

In 1965, the Massachusetts State Board of Education released a report titled Because It Is Right Educationally, also known as the Kiernan Commission report. The report argued that racial imbalance of schools in Massachusetts existed, and noted, Racial imbalance represents a serious conflict within the American creed of equal opportunity. It is detrimental to sound education in the following ways: It does serious educational damage to Negro children by impairing their confidence, distorting their self image, and lowering their motivation. It does moral damage by encouraging prejudice within children regardless of their color. It represents an inaccurate picture of life to both white and Negro children and prepares them inadequately for a multi-racial community, nation, and world. It too often produces inferior educational facilities in the predominantly Negro schools. It squanders valuable human resources by impairing the opportunities

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of many Negro children to prepare for the professional and vocational requirements of our technological society. It is imperative that we begin to end this harmful system of separation. The means are at hand. Each day of delay is a day of damage to the children of our Commonwealth.6

The release of the report immediately preceded the enactment of Massachusetts’ Racial Imbalance Act of 1965, a law that dealt with equal access and civil rights in Massachusetts’ schools. The act provided a formula for defining a racially imbalanced school as one with more than 50 percent nonwhite pupils. The act required that, to address the existence of such schools, each local school committee would need to provide the Board of Education with an annual census of students by race. The act noted that any imbalanced school system could lose state funds. The act also declared that a policy of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was to promote racial balance in public school settings, with a goal of preventing or eliminating racial imbalance. If an imbalance were found, the local school committee would be required to file a plan to address it. According to the Kiernan report, forty-five of Boston’s schools were racially imbalanced. As a result, the Boston school district was placed under state scrutiny. The response from members of the Boston School Committee to both the Kiernan report and the Racial Imbalance Act was one of both denial and resistance. The reaction of one board member, William O’Connor, Hicks’s successor for chair of the school committee, reflected the perspectives of several committee members: “We have no inferior education in our schools. What we have been getting is an inferior type of student.”7 His sentiments were clearly echoed, if by nothing else, by a lack of activity from the Boston School Committee on the implementation of plans to address school integration. At a school committee meeting in March 1965, board member Joseph Lee spoke in reaction to the Kiernan Commission report. His presentation to the board and the general public articulated some of the perceptions he had of the increasing numbers of African Americans in the schools. Lee’s comments were couched partially in the context of Boston’s changing demographics, which coincided with its experiences in the northern migration of the 1940s and 1950s, and pointed to various perceptions that members of the committee held. One image Lee presented was of the takeover of communities by African Americans: In other words, if the white population of America is to stay the same, and the Negro population is to double with each generation under its high birthrate, than the 10 Negro units in every present 100 units of American population will become 20 Negro units with the next generation 20 years from now; then it will become 40 Negro units in the second generation 40 years from now; in

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the third generation 80 units 60 years from now; and 160 units 80 years from now—while the white population remains static at 90 units—so that, if Mr. Eisenstadt [another of the board members] lives to a good old age, he will see America a predominantly Negro nation, like Africa.8

One component of Lee’s presentation, found particularly disturbing by many of the African American parents in attendance, was an illustration he used to describe African American children in the schools at the time: To move the Negro majority at the core out into schools to the rim would merely transplant the Negro majority farther out. It is like the mark on the knee of a child’s breeches when he falls on a tarry schoolyard or street. The cleansing fluid will relieve the mark all right. But the mark will just reappear as a ring on the cloth at the outermost reaches of the cleansing fluid.9

In 1967, The Boston School Committee and many of the teachers and administrators within the school system found themselves the subjects of criticism from Jonathan Kozol, a former teacher who had been fired from the district for calling into question the imbalances of the system. In his book, Death at an Early Age, Kozol opened the eyes of many people nationally to the conditions within Boston schools. Numerous passages in the book presented some of the conditions faced by children in many of the more segregated schools, and spoke to the unsupportive learning environments in which many of these students found themselves. As Kozol noted in one observation, It is the Boston school teachers themselves who for years have been speaking of the Negro children in their charge as “animals” and the school building that houses them as “a zoo.” And it is well known by now how commonly the injustices and depredations of the Boston school system have compelled its Negro pupils to regard themselves with something less than the dignity and respect of human beings.10

The Emergence of Busing On March 15, 1972, a group of civil rights lawyers filed a class-action suit in the U.S. District Court on behalf of fifteen African American parents and forty-three children, against the Boston School Committee, based on the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. The lead plaintiff selected was a twenty-four-year-old mother of three, Tallulah Morgan. The lead defendant, as chairman of the Boston School Committee, was James Hennigan. The original complaint filed depicted several of the racial imbalances of the Boston schools. Of the 197 schools in the Boston school system, eighty-eight

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had 90 percent or greater white attendance and thirty-three had 90 percent or greater black attendance. Overall, only 6 percent of faculty, 6 percent of supervising administrative staff and 6 percent of general administrative staff were black. On June 21, 1974, Federal District Judge W. Arthur Garrity decided the case Morgan v. Hennigan. From a review of numerous documents, Garrity was able to identify several instances of the creation of segregated schools and a lack of compliance with state and federal guidelines to potentially rectify the imbalance. He further noted in his ruling that members of the school committee had acted with the intent to segregate. Garrity presented the school committee with several options for addressing the issue. One of the core strategies was a plan to begin the following September to bus thousands of students between schools in predominantly black and predominantly white communities. Members of the Boston School Committee reacted negatively and became vociferous critics of school busing. Committee members declared that they would comply with the direct orders of Judge Garrity, but said that they would assume a position of minimal compliance on all approaches; however, they also vowed to “fight busing.” School Chairman John McDonough noted to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “For my part, I will not go any further than doing what Judge Garrity directly orders me to do. And I will not end up a salesman for a plan which I do not believe in.” Another committee member, John Kerrigan, noted that he felt the committee should “appeal every word that comes out of Garrity’s mouth,” as a strategy for resistance.11 Resistance to busing as a means of desegregating schools quickly turned violent. During the first four days of school that year, mob violence broke out near several of the schools, and several of the buses bringing children in from other communities to go to school were pelted with stones. In several instances, the activity by crowds became increasingly violent. On September 16, a group of white youth from south Boston attacked a group of blacks near a subway station. In early October, a Haitian maintenance worker was attacked by a group of whites as he went to pickup his wife from work. As a result of these and other instances, the rest of the nation was provided an imagery suggesting northern hostilities in the latter civil rights era. For a total of eleven years, the battles related to school busing became a major component of Judge Garrity’s career. During that time, he issued more than four hundred orders relating to busing and became recognized as the judge with the greatest level of activity in school desegregation issues of any judge up until that time. During that same period, Boston turned the tables on who was perceived as The Other within an urban rioting context. Instead of television sets showing imagery of African Americans rioting in urban settings, the image that

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appeared was of whites throwing rocks, overturning police cars, and for a short time, at least, becoming the embodiment of the angry urban Other. Garrity’s position ultimately made him the pariah of many of the white Boston communities that were at the heart of busing—and the recipient of numerous letters articulating opposition to his position. For many of the parents who articulated opposition, one strategy for responding to school integration was flight from the city to the suburbs, a pattern that emerged in many other cities and thus reinforced patterns of segregation that had begun in many urban school districts.

Conclusion Decades following Judge Garrity’s decision, disparities in schools are still a major challenge in many communities. The challenges of continuing segregation— triggered largely through white flight from many of the urban school systems, which now are overwhelmingly low income and minority—point to the reality that our systems of education are still in need of progress. As we reflect on the disparities in educational opportunities and think about the historical creations of The Other, we have ample room for questioning the constructed processes through which urban students, half a century following the rulings in the Brown cases, are still treated by political and administrative systems as members of a community less deserving of the same educational opportunities as their nonminority peers. In reflecting on the future of educational systems and processes, much of the challenge is to reverse such actions and modes of assumption and consistently strive for the development of systems that ensure the equity of access and opportunity for all, despite previously constructed notions of Otherness.

Notes 1. Brown v. Board of Education, 347, U.S. 483 (1954). 2. Charles Sumner, Orations and Speeches. Argument against the Constitutionality of Separate Colored Schools Before the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, in the case of Sarah C. Roberts v. The City of Boston, December 4, 1849. (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1850), 360. 3. Sarah C. Roberts v. The City of Boston. 59 Massachusetts, 198 (1849). 4. J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 100. 5. Joshua Smith, Boston: Cradle of Liberty or Separate but Equal. Theory into Practice, 17 (1978): 58.

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6. Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 133. 7. Jeanne Theoharis, They Told Us Our Kids Were Stupid: Ruth Babson and the Education Movement in Boston. In J. Theoharis and K. Woodward (eds.), Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movement in America. (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 25. 8. J. Kozol, 219. 9. Ibid., 214. 10. Ibid., 7. 11. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Hearing Held in Boston, MA, June 16–20, 1975, 468.

IV THE OTHER IN AN ERA OF LATE MODERNITY

11 Welfare and The Other

SOCIETY’S ROLE IN ADDRESSING THE NEEDS OF PEOPLE at its economic margins creates a number of questions for policymakers. What, if any, role should government play in providing assistance to its citizenry during a time of need? How might government engage in financing such strategies? At what point is it acceptable for government to expand programs to address the needs of this population? When should government retract such programs? Rapidly industrializing nations such as the United States during the twentieth century wrestled with a number of these questions about the provision or retraction of relief. In the 1930s, an expansion of relief policies occurred as the nation confronted challenges during the midst of the Great Depression. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the number of individuals benefiting from many relief programs had grown several-fold and comprised a far more diverse set of individuals than the initial program designers had imagined. The 1970s saw a rapid series of attacks within policy circles on the welfare system as it had emerged and on the welfare recipient at the time; many of these attacks were laden with language that painted the recipient as The Other, and they culminated in the development of a framework of the welfare recipient that led to changes to several components of the welfare system in the 1990s. This chapter examines an emerging concept of welfare and welfare policies of the United States in relation to a notion of the welfare recipient as The Other. My primary argument is that the Personal Responsibility and Work

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Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, evolved as a result of many of the perspectives that had emerged of the welfare recipient by the 1990s. In the latter part of the twentieth century—when this act was passed—there were, as we will explore, numerous racial undertones related to the makeup of America’s welfare system. While the concept of welfare has traditionally brought with it a number of concerns related to both the cost to the individual and to the larger society of establishing systems of full or partial dependency on government, the discourse of the 1990s was the culmination of years of debate on welfare reform and ended several years of both shifting perceptions of the welfare recipient and growing public animosity to the images of the welfare recipient as The Other. I begin with a historical overview of the welfare reform issue starting with the passage of the 1935 Social Security Act, which serves as the foundation of our formalized social safety net for many of the poor and elderly in our country. I continue with shifts in perceptions of the makeup of welfare recipients during the War on Poverty. I conclude the chapter with an examination of the correlations of images of The Other in the debates related to welfare reform, specifically in the context of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.

Depression-era Foundations The years of the Great Depression in the United States brought with them numerous questions about what strategies should be used to address the economic insecurity that individuals were facing and many communities’ rising instability that had resulted from such insecurity. People’s financial frustrations increasingly were manifested in protests, demonstrations, or forms of mass violence that plagued various cities. When compared to previous economic depressions, the depression of the 1930s was unique in its concentration of poverty. Because this depression was the first that occurred in urban versus primarily rural America, concentrated poverty made the impact of massive unemployment far more visible than it had been earlier. Rural poverty is much easier to hide and ignore than urban poverty, and the poor who are more geographically dispersed on farms are traditionally much easier to placate than the concentrated poor in the cities. Thus, administrative and political decision-makers looking to respond to the challenges at hand found themselves with a new form of economic depression— an urban one—to which they had to respond. Debates emerged in policy circles on how to best respond to the growing number of people who were directly affected by the labor and economic is-

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sues of the 1930s. Some, such as President Herbert Hoover, saw a limited role for government in directly addressing the labor needs of the time. Hoover argued that instead, market-driven and charitable impulses should frame the general responses to the needs of the people. Others, such as Hoover’s successor, Franklin Roosevelt, argued that government should have an enhanced role. The need for the development of a response, either grounded in the charitable sector or grounded in the world of government, was, regardless, a direct reaction to the image of the economically marginalized Other during the era. On August 14, 1935, Roosevelt signed into law the 1935 Social Security Act. Each of the act’s five titles addressed the needs of a segment of the population deemed as needing protection under various components of the act. The first two titles addressed assistance for the elderly by establishing the foundations for old age retirement accounts and grants to states for the establishment of old-age benefits. Title III of the act focused on matters addressing unemployment compensation. The final two areas focused on the provision of assistance to women and children from either the Aid for Dependent Children program or grants to states for maternal and child health services. One of the major challenges that existed in ensuring the ultimate passage of the act was that a large number of congressmen whose support Roosevelt needed were from southern states. Of the thirty-three Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee, for example, seventeen were southerners. Many of the committees that the congressmen represented were dependent on an agrarian economy, which had a largely African American sharecropping labor force at its core. The financial support that the proposed federal assistance would have provided would have enabled many of these sharecroppers to earn more than they would have under the existing system. In order to gain the support of congressional representatives from these areas and to facilitate the passage of the act, the legislation would ultimately need to address the concerns of these members of Congress and to ensure that the new social provisions would not affect the sharecropping labor pool. As passed, the act limited the benefits that African Americans in the labor force could receive. Title III of the 1935 act limited who could receive support. The definition excluded two groups of laborers—agricultural laborers and domestic servants working in private homes. For the first half of the twentieth century, when the largest part of the African American workforce in the South consisted of sharecroppers and African American women in domestic settings as housekeepers, this definition excluded large percentages of the African American population from even being eligible for Social Security benefits.

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The impact of this was several-fold. First, it excluded large segments of populations from being able to access support under the nascent welfare system. It also has added to generational economic disparities between African Americans, many of whom were not eligible for support under Social Security, and whites, who were able to access such assistance and ultimately pass the benefit of having secured such assistance from one generation to the next. In the context of the initial development of key elements of the welfare system, as we will explore, the initial beneficiary of welfare was very different from the image of the welfare recipient who would later be envisioned.

Aid for Families with Dependent Children Title IV of the Social Security Act created a program known as Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), which was later renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). This program was based on the understanding that single mothers—mostly widows or abandoned spouses—would be enabled to stay at home to raise their children and not enter the workforce. It was developed during an era when social norms expected that, for a significant portion of time, a mother should be attending to the needs of her children and not participating in the workforce external to the home. AFDC was initially structured to enable state control in determining program eligibility. In the initial draft legislation, a clause was included that mandated that AFDC provide a level of support that would ensure an equitable distribution of resources. As with the definition of employment in Title III of the act, several southern members of Congress insisted on the removal of this clause, in order to enable individual states to determine eligibility. As a result, state disparities in the levels of ADC benefits—particularly to African Americans—varied greatly. In 1940, the national average ADC payment was about $13.00 per month per child. African American children in Arkansas only received $3.52 per month, and African American children in South Carolina were getting a little more than $4.00 per month. In other southern states, the payment per African American child ranged between $5.00 and $8.00 per month. Eligibility for benefits was determined at the state level, thus further enabling the implementation of policies that denied eligibility to families. The chief strategy for the deniability of benefits was the determination of factors referred to as “suitable home policies.” These policies enabled caseworkers to deny benefits to families with children born out of wedlock or to screen families in cases when mothers were believed to be engaged in what were deemed by the caseworkers as illicit relations. In some cases, states were able to deny assistance during times when there was a higher need for labor than usual.

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As a result of many of the policies, a significant portion of the African American population was excluded from eligibility for benefits awarded under the provisions of the 1935 Social Security Act. When the legislation was written for intended recipients who were perceived as being primarily white, the general level of support for such provisions was significantly different from when the recipients of the resources under these provisions were perceived as being African American. A disparity in the provision of benefits, divided along lines of race, had emerged. Much of this disparity in the provision of benefits would remain until welfare reemerged in the public discourse in the early 1960s.

1960s and Criticisms of Welfare Reform The reemergence of a public discourse on poverty in the 1960s coincided with the emergence of discourse on welfare in the United States. This welfare conversation was driven by several factors. The first was the introduction of the image of the welfare recipient into the policy discourse. In 1962, West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd launched a major investigation into matters of welfare fraud which he and others in policymaking roles began to argue was rapidly becoming an area of concern. Byrd’s perspective on this issue can be summarized in the following statement from the hearings: I do not recall one instance in which a child has grown up to amount to anything where liquor in the home, and the mother’s illicit relations with paramours are the order of the day. And seldom, if ever, do the lazy and slothful ever get anywhere. It is about time, therefore, that we stop encouraging indolence and shiftlessness, and that we quit furnishing money, food, and rent for indecent mothers and paramours who contribute nothing but illegitimate children to the society of this Federal City, most of whom end up roaming the streets and getting arrested for various crimes.1

As a result of the Byrd hearings, the image of the welfare abuser quickly was circulated throughout the media during that era and helped to expand upon the notion of the welfare recipient as the person conducting fraud upon the American public with taxpayer resources. In 1961, the city of Newburgh, New York, became the setting for one of the early public battles related to welfare reform. During the early years of the great northern migration, Newburgh, a city with a population of only 30,000 people, witnessed a huge increase in its African American population as people moved there from the South. In 1950, the city’s African American population was only one-sixteenth of the total population. By 1960, it reached one-sixth of the total population. As in other

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northern cities, this sudden and visible influx of African Americans was met with a variety of responses from long-standing residents. Noted one retired resident, “The Negroes who are moving up here these days want everything for nothing; they have no respect for anybody; they knock you right off the street.” Or as another resident noted, “They come in here by the truckload, get a house and have kids of all colors and force all decent people to move away.”2 As the link between the new residents and welfare policies became solidified in the minds of many of Newburgh’s residents, City Manager Joseph Mitchell perceived many of the new migrants from the South as flooding the relief rolls, increasing crime levels, and causing numerous social dilemmas for the city. To address this issue, Mitchell attempted to implement a new set of rules for people who were on welfare. In one instance, he required welfare recipients to collect checks from the local police department, thus from his perspective discouraging fraud and in the perspective of several of the recipients making it more intimidating to receive their welfare payments. The story of Mitchell and Newburgh drew national attention through various stories in the press about welfare reform efforts in Newburgh. Ultimately, Newburgh’s image became that of a city that chose to stand up to what was being depicted as a growing number of welfare recipients moving to the city from the South. Civil rights legislation passed during the 1960s made it significantly more difficult for government agencies to discriminate in determining who would be permitted to access public assistance. As a result, many African Americans whom discriminatory policies had prohibited from accessing support were suddenly able to receive benefits. Changes in administrative procedures related to the determination of eligibility of benefits, closely aligned with an increase in the number of community-level advocates for the poor resulting from the War on Poverty’s support for community action agencies, enabled more people to become champions for ensuring that poor people, and in particular, poor African Americans, were able to receive support. In many communities, local advocates helped ensure that residents became aware of various forms of public assistance that they could access and made them aware of the limitations and benefits of that assistance. Finally, public interest lawyers mounted several challenges to some of the practices of state and local welfare officials. Several of these legal attempts went as far as the Supreme Court, where between 1968 and 1971, the Court struck down absent father role residency requirements and required welfare agencies to provide proper notice to recipients threatened with termination. In the 1968 case of King v. Smith, the Court found that Aid to Families with Dependent Children could not be denied to a woman having a relationship with

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a man who was not the father of her children. The first ruling came as a result of the case of Mrs. Sylvester Smith, a woman living in Alabama with her four children who had been denied AFDC assistance by the state because a man was visiting her on weekends. The 1969 case of Shapiro v. Thomas provided another example of the Court’s rulings in matters pertaining to welfare assistance at the time. In this particular case, a teenage mother with a child applied for AFDC assistance after moving to Connecticut from Massachusetts. Connecticut denied assistance because the mother did not satisfy the state’s one-year residency requirement. When the case was ultimately decided alongside two other cases (Washington v. Legrant and Reynolds v. Smith) the Court ruled that, because the regulation touched “on the fundamental right of interstate movement,” the state must provide a compelling interest for the failure to provide assistance. The welfare conversation was also driven by a shift in media depictions of poverty and welfare. In his Why America Hates Welfare (2000), Gilens observes an increasingly common image of African Americans as representations of the poor in the period from 1950 to 1992. Between 1950 and 1964, media images of the poor were predominantly of whites, many of whom were in the rural parts of Appalachia. By the mid 1960s, images of the poor in news coverage increasingly were of African Americans. In 1964, for example, only 27 percent of the poor in images in the three major national news magazines (Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report) were African American. In 1965, 1966, and 1967, those percentages rose to 49 percent, 53 percent, and 72 percent, respectively.3 According to Gilens, significant differences also existed in the types of stories related to welfare and poverty that appeared in the media over time. As stories became more critical of the efforts that occurred during the War on Poverty, the number of blacks depicted in images of poverty increased. As Gilens notes, “Media coverage from the early 1960s tended to use pictures of poor blacks to illustrate stories about waste, inefficiency, or abuse of welfare, and pictures of poor whites in stories with more neutral descriptions of antipoverty programs.”4 Gilens observes that various spikes in the imagery of African Americans as representatives of welfare recipients correlated with negative depictions of welfare recipients. As a result, these helped to further the image of the African American welfare recipient as The Other.

Emergent Presidential Discourse on Welfare By the early 1970s, the number of people on the welfare rolls in the United States had noticeably increased. The number of Americans on public assistance

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grew from 7.1 million in 1960 to 7 .8 million in 1965, to 11.1 million in 1969, and to 14.4 million in 1974. All of this growth came in the number of people on AFDC, which increased from 3.1 million in 1960, to 6.1 million in 1969, and to 10.8 million by 1974.5 In the eyes of various political leaders, the system had grown to a point of drastically needed reform. In his 1971 State of the Union Address, President Nixon shared his disdain for the welfare system by noting that the welfare system “has become a monstrous, consuming outrage—an outrage against the community, against the taxpayer, and particularly against the children it is supposed to help.”6 Others shared Nixon’s perspectives on welfare. In the mid 1970s, President Carter referred to welfare as “antiwork, antifamily, inequitable in its treatment of the poor and wasteful of taxpayers’ dollars.”7 During the 1976 presidential campaign, then-candidate Ronald Reagan introduced an image of the “welfare queen,” which in turn provided yet another image of the welfare recipient as The Other within policy discourse. Reagan’s depiction of this “welfare queen” was of a woman who has “80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting social security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names.”8

Emergent Discussion on the Underclass By the mid 1980s, the emergence of a view of the “underclass” began to shape many of the policy perspectives related to welfare recipients as belonging to a member of the group referred to as the underclass. Many of the proponents of this perspective focused on two facts of life for the urban poor to help shape this notion: crime and broken families. Some of the proponents of this debate drew on marriage statistics within the black community to support their arguments. By the mid 1980s, 45 percent of black households were headed by women. In early 1985, nearly 14 million children, or 22 percent of all American children, lived in families with incomes below the poverty line. More than half of these children lived in families headed by women, and they were disproportionately black and Hispanic. Increasingly, social demographers had statistics, in this case of the African American or Hispanic single mother, that would help paint an image of the welfare recipient as The Other. The publication of Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994) provided a foundation for conceptualization of the welfare recipient as cognitively inferior to others. One of the groups that Herrnstein and Murray ex-

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amined was mothers on welfare. According to their research, women who were chronic welfare recipients had lower IQs on average than those who stayed off welfare, and those lower IQs correlated to a higher number of illegitimate births. Herrnstein and Murray were able to generate a fair amount of discussion about the notions presented in their book; much of the discourse that stemmed from reaction to the book was sparked by images of the African American welfare recipient as The Other. An intellectual foundation was also provided by the increasing role of various public policy think tanks that were involved in informing policymakers and framing a discussion on policy approaches. Particularly with the Republican majority in Congress in 1994, think-tank-based scholars from policy organizations with more conservative agendas found themselves playing a greater role in framing the discourse related to welfare. In particular, several Washington, D.C.-based think tanks helped to build conceptualizations of the welfare recipient that were based on various images that had surfaced in the past. Robert Rector of The Heritage Foundation, for example, one key analyst who examined a number of issues pertaining to family and welfare issues, played a critical role in framing images of the welfare recipient. Rector advocated a reformed welfare system that focused on the themes of requiring welfare recipients to work in exchange for the receipt of benefits, reducing incentives for single parenthood, and increasing the rewards for work and marriage. Rector’s observations on the causes of welfare were crucial in shaping the perceptions of many analysts on the challenges within the system and the makeup of recipient’s of benefits. As he noted, Welfare makes it possible for young, unmarried women to have children and set up house as single parents. This is another reason welfare costs are skyrocketing. The welfare rolls increase geometrically year by year because many welfare children grow up to do the same thing their mothers did. This must stop. Statistically, children born out of wedlock are by far the most likely to fail in school, take drugs and engage in crime.9

Rector’s images of forms of the welfare recipient surfaced in many political leaders’ statements on matters of welfare at the time. A 1995 speech by former California Governor Pete Wilson demonstrates the perspectives of several policymakers on the makeup of welfare recipients: The federal model of welfare simply provides a welfare check to an unwed childmother—who is too young to get a driver’s license—so she can move out to her own apartment. How utterly irresponsible. Then she is given even more accessible prey to the next man seeking a junior-high school one-night stand romance. It doesn’t have to be that way.10

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These pronouncements reflect the fact that by the mid 1990s, the general environment was ripe for a discussion of factors related to the reforming of welfare systems and processes. Images of the welfare recipient as The Other, framed largely in the discourse that had built from the early 1960s to the early 1990s, helped reformulate the perspectives in ways that led to changes in the system.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act A 1994 CBS News–New York Times poll reported that 55 percent of respondents believed that most people on welfare were African American. It was to this perception that then-President Clinton aligned himself while surrounded by several African American mothers at the signing of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in August of 1996. This photo opportunity did not take into account the reality that a similar group of African American mothers sixty-one years earlier would largely have been excluded from the provisions of the 1935 Social Security Act establishing the foundations of the welfare system in the United States. The act outlined the framework for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, which would replace AFDC programs. The section of the act on TANF began with an overview of marriage and its benefits to society as a whole. It continued with an exploration of absent fathers, out-of-wedlock births, and pregnancy factors. The block grant programs that emerged were focused on providing states with the means to address and provide for four areas of need. First, assistance would be provided to needy families so that children could be cared for in their own homes or in the homes of relatives. Second, they aimed to end the dependency of needy parents on government benefits by promoting job preparation, work, and marriage. Third, they aimed to prevent and reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies and to establish annual numerical goals for reducing the number of these pregnancies. Finally, they aimed to encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families. The second title of the act dealt with eligibility factors for supplemental security income (SSI) and the denial of SSI eligibility to people who had engaged in fraudulent activities, were fugitive felons, or had violated parole or probation. Title III of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act focused on factors related to the provision of child support and required enhanced processes for shaping various child support payments and strategies. The act served to implement various processes that had been developed based on images of The Other. Each of its titles clearly spoke to a perception

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that had emerged within the wider discourse on the welfare recipient as The Other, particularly the concepts of the welfare recipient that had evolved during the 1980s and 1990s.

Conclusion In the years following its signing, the impact of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act has been mixed. The concerns of the working poor have replaced much of the discussion on the welfare recipient. According to an analysis conducted by the Associated Press in 2007, the number of people on public assistance programs in the country continues to grow, despite changes in welfare policies.11 While our welfare programs have changed, our economic and social disparities continue. Much of our work in the area of welfare has drifted from core questions of how a society looks after segments of its population, which for any one of a number of reasons are consistently placed in positions of economic and other risk. Instead, discourse on welfare has focused on the development of an image of an individual undeserving of attention or assistance from the rest of society. That much of this discourse paralleled a rising prevalence of a racialized image of the welfare recipient is of increasing relevance as we reflect upon constructed images of the welfare recipient as The Other and the development of political and administrative responses related to this individual.

Notes 1. Kenneth Neubeck and Noel Cazenave, Welfare Racism: Playing the Race Card against America’s Poor. (New York: Routledge, 2001), 99. 2. Newburgh’s Lessons for the Nation. New York Times, December 17, 1961, SM7. 3. Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of AntiPoverty Policy. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 114. 4. Ibid., 117. 5. J. T. Patterson, America’s Struggle against Poverty 1900–1994 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 171. 6. Richard Nixon, Annual Message to Congress on the State of the Union, January 22, 1971. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon, 1971. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971), 51. 7. Jimmy Carter, The President’s News Conference of August 6, 1977. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Jimmy Carter, 1977. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977), 1443.

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8. Welfare Queen Becomes Issue in Reagan Campaign. New York Times, February 15, 1976, 51. 9. Robert Rector, How to Reform Welfare, statement August 1, 1995, The Heritage Foundation. Retrieved on May 18, 2008 from www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ED080195b.cfm. 10. Pete Wilson, Kicking America’s Welfare Habit: Politics, Illegitimacy, and Personal Responsibility, statement September 6, 1995, The Heritage Foundation. Retrieved on May 18, 2008 from www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/HL540.cfm. 11. Welfare State Growing Despite Our Overhauls. Washington Post, February 26, 2007, A3.

12 Counting and Categorizing The Other

VERY TEN YEARS SINCE 1790, THE U.S. CENSUS has provided an estimate of the size of the U.S. population. From this instrument, we can trace the growth of the nation’s population from 3.9 million people when the first Census was taken to 291.4 million people in 2000. The Census also gives us a means for examining various changes in social trends. We can examine the movements of people from rural to urban settings, across different regions of the nation, and across various other geographical settings. The Census has also provided a continual story of various categories of people within U.S. society and, as importantly, background on the categorization process. Groups of people have been named or classified largely as a result of particular social trends of a given time. We have expanded the numbers of people we count as a result of general population growth as much as their inclusion in the general parameters of political or social existence within our national discourse. The last days of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twentyfirst century have witnessed the creation and re-creation of The Other in policy discourse related to the Census. Much of this discourse was contextualized in debates related to the composition and size of the U.S. population. We found ourselves by the year 2000 with more people from a greater diversity of backgrounds than we had ever experienced as a nation. Such tremendous diversity provided a backdrop for conversations about how difference is related to policy, conversations that were in some ways far more complex than were probably anticipated during the constitutional years of the 1780s.

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The issue of inclusion in Census counts and categorization has become increasingly complex in recent years. Part of the reason relates to the methodology of the counting process. Although various government officials, stretching back to George Washington, have expressed doubts about the accuracy of Census data, this concern has risen dramatically in the decades since 1950, when concern about the undercount of population groups within U.S. society began to enter the methodological discourse related to the Census. This notion of an undercount has leveraged a number of other conversations related to Census methodology—particularly around issues of who does the counting and how they do it. Census complexity can also be linked to questions of classification, particularly along the lines of race and ethnicity. How, particularly when we have come into an era of recognizing that our categorization process is largely based on the social construction of groups, should we classify based on factors pertaining to race and ethnicity? The social constructivist question is of particular relevance during a time when scientific literature, largely from a genetic standpoint, tells us that we are much more similar as human beings than we are different. This chapter examines the Census in the context of framing many of the policy debates related to The Other. I begin with a brief examination of the history of the U.S. Census, examining, in particular, key points in its evolution from the first Census of 1790 to the present. There have been in the history of the Census, several key turning points related to questions and issues pertaining to its development and evolution. Many of these ultimately frame core factors and issues pertaining to conceptualizations of The Other in policy discourse. My coverage of the history of the Census focuses upon two such time periods. I then explore in detail two debates that have shaped Census policy over the last fifty years—and as a result, Census issues as related to policies pertaining to The Other, the issue of the undercount, and classification. I close with an examination of the impact of these two issues on our discourse pertaining to The Other.

History of the Census: Early Years Article One, Section Two, of the U.S. Constitution established the requirement for a count of the U.S. population every ten years. This provision was established primarily to address the interest of the constitutional framers that political power in the United States be based on representation. Framing the potential power base of the new nation and developing a numerical basis for the makeup of the House of Representatives required the calculation of how many people lived in different places to help ensure such representation.

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This section of the Constitution provides a formula for the initial calculation of the population’s makeup by noting that the count “shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all persons [slaves].” As a result, it helped to establish part of the basic categorization process used for framing those included within the American polity. The Constitution did not mention race as one of its areas for classification, and, in fact, the issue of race did not come into mention until Congress passed the 1790 Census Act two years later. The 1790 act created the categories of who was to be counted: free white males under sixteen, free white males sixteen and older, free white females, all other free persons, and slaves. This framework established who would be noted in the population count for the new nation. Native Americans were not to be recognized, and would not be until 1924, when Congress awarded citizenship to all Native Americans in the United States. Indentured servants—white males and females who were not free—were also not counted. Slaves were only counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of representation. Ultimately, defining who was to be included and who was not gave rise to questions about who was a part of U.S. society and who made up The Other. U.S. marshalls were the Census takers from that initial year until the 1840 Census. Their selection raised a question that has surfaced throughout the history of the Census, specifically related to who actually does the counting. Coupled with issues of who was to be counted and methods used for counting, issues of who the Census takers were, established the context for questions that would follow the Census until well into the twentieth century and helped to shape more recent questions related to the framing and enumeration of The Other. Issue 1: The Undercount In the 1940s, the ever-looming threat of imprisonment for noncompliance drove millions of young men to register for the selective services. One of the byproducts of this was that the draft was able to generate a new set of statistics on young men across a variety of racial spectra during that decade. In 1947, statistician Daniel Price used data from the selective services to develop several conclusions on the accuracy of the 1940 Census, particularly related to various subgroups within the wider population. He observed that the selective services numbers revealed that 13 percent of African American men were not counted in the 1940 Census. As a result, a significant difference existed between the numbers of African American men who registered for the selective service versus for the Census. These conclusions were supported by findings

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of Coale (1955), who estimated that while there was an undercount of the general population of 3.6 percent, there was a nonwhite undercount of 12 to 13 percent in the 1950 Census. The 1940s and 1950s presented a growing interest in the further development of statistical methods in the social sciences. As a result, Census processes found themselves influenced by numerous discussions on new methodological strategies and approaches for improving statistical processes in the Census. As a result, numerous methodological discussions were framed, including many of the strategies for addressing the undercount. By the 1960s, Census officials and demographers who were understanding Census undercounts, had established various evaluation procedures, and had engaged in technical discussions related to counting various population groups. In the early 1960s, federal grants in aid systems became increasingly dependent on Census data for the allocation of resources to state and local governments. Census data were crucial in determining funding allocations, so state and local officials were particularly concerned about factors related to the various counts and undercounts; population size had a measurable impact on the resources that a community would receive. The 1960s also witnessed changes in the growing importance and visibility of the civil rights movement and its calls for addressing various disparities related to access and opportunity in various segments of U.S. society. Census data became increasingly useful in making the case for addressing such disparities. In 1961, President Kennedy signed Executive Order 10925, which created the Committee on Equal Opportunity and charged it with ensuring equality in employment in the federal government itself and in federal contracts with other agencies. Three years later, Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and charged it with implementing various federal guidelines related to racial balance. In 1965, President Johnson signed Executive Order 11246, requiring government agencies and contractors to establish affirmative action plans for the inclusion of minorities in the workplace. These factors enhanced interest in ensuring accuracy in the counting of population groups in the U.S. Census. It became necessary to report on and keep track of these various statistics. In 1966, the Census Bureau established the Committee on Difficult to Enumerate Groups to examine methodological and evaluative factors related to the challenge of the undercount. In 1967, as part of a statistics and cities conference, the bureau noted its intention to give attention to groups that might not be reached through regular efforts. One of the observations from the conference report noted that

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where a group defined by racial or ethnic terms, and concentrated in special political jurisdictions, is significantly undercounted in relation to other groups, the individual members of that group are thereby deprived of the constitutional right to equal representation in the House of Representatives and by influence, in other legislative bodies.1

The National Research Council’s report America’s Uncounted People (1972) focused on several issues related to the undercount and argued that the undercount is largely an issue of the disconnect between the assumptions underlying Census procedures and operations. One contribution of the report was the introduction of the phrase “the social psychology of anonymity.” Authors of the report noted that “missing people are not inherently missing, or invisible, or anonymous, until they are made so by a lack of fit between the assumptions and procedures that guide the counting operation that attempts to locate them and the subjective, experiential categories, or characteristics and behaviors, in which they define their own situation.”2 Two major concerns were noted in the report: the acknowledgement of a lack of understanding of the social and behavioral aspects of census and survey operations, and the recognition of a need for better measures of groups within the broader population. The report focused on the challenges related to the undercount, particularly as pertaining to young black men, who the report noted were the largest group of the uncounted in U.S. society. America’s Uncounted People proposed the adoption of an interactionist social theory as a strategy for improving the enumeration of undercounted populations. This theory takes into account both conventional and nonconventional lifestyles, as imagined by those defining and developing the Census. The report argued that society is frequently organized in ways that are far more complex than traditional census and social surveys consider. As the authors noted, “An immediate concern of this report has been the possibility that some people are not counted in censuses because the social circumstances and behaviors that distinguish them as ‘persons’ are not adequately comprehended by census counting instruments and categories of social identification.”3 Despite much of the research that had been conducted as a result of the Census undercount, the issue of the undercount surfaced again in conjunction with the 1970 Census. The Census Bureau conceded that it had missed 5.3 million people in the count. This number was smaller than in 1960, but the disparity between white and black remained; 1.9 percent of whites were missed in Census counts, and 7.7 percent of African Americans were missed. The 1970 Census also significantly undercounted the number of Spanish speakers. According to a 1974 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report titled

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Counting The Forgotten: The 1970 Census Count of Persons of Spanish Speaking Background in the United States, people of Spanish-speaking backgrounds were undercounted by 7.7 percent in the 1970 Census. In the transmission of the report to the Census Bureau, the Commission noted various flaws in the process the bureau used to reach out to Spanish speakers. These flaws included a lack of a uniform process to identify all Spanish speakers and inadequate assistance to Spanish-speaking households, particularly in the form of bilingual Census takers, to assist such households to respond accurately to the Census questionnaire. By the late 1970s, matters of Census undercount were the subject of a number of lawsuits that surfaced across the country. In the spring of 1980, the city of Detroit filed a suit asking courts to mandate an adjustment of what they claimed would lead to the undercount of minorities, and as a result, much of Detroit’s population. Soon, eight additional cases were filed, leading to a total of fifty-two lawsuits being filed against the Census Bureau, challenging the procedures used in 1980 to correct for the known undercount of minorities. The undercount speaks to the challenge of basic enumeration: How do we ensure that population segments are included in population counts? The impact of the undercount is several-fold. First is its effect on funding; if a group is not represented, that has an impact on formulas for funding in communities, particularly in federal dollars. Second is a political impact; counts of the population determine the basis of representation within the House of Representatives. The third impact is social and psychological. In the National Academy of Sciences report America’s Uncounted People, the notion of the psychology of anonymity suggests that some of the largest societal and individual challenges accrue when groups are at the margins of a society as a result of their invisibility. Issue 2: Group Identity and Classification The 1790 Census established an initial framework for classification that served as a point of departure for later classifications in the Census. How group labels are formed and how they evolve is the second area of concern for various questions pertaining to The Other. In 1977, Office of Management and Budget Directive Number 15 created five official categories related to race: American Indian or Alaskan Native; Asian; Black or African American; Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander; and White. Two categories were established for ethnicity: Hispanic or Latino, and not Hispanic or Latino. In February 1994, at the request of the Office of Management and Budget, the National Academy of Sciences organized a workshop to review Directive

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15 in preparation for the 2000 Census. In June of that year, public hearings were held to discuss the racial categorizations. According to the Office of Management and Budget, several hundred concerns had been articulated regarding the categorization process and over ninety individuals testified on the need to revisit the categorizations. New standards were adopted in October 1997, with six new categories on the 2000 Census: American Indian or Alaskan Native (including Central and South America); Asian; Black or African American; Hispanic or Latino; Native Hawaiian/other Pacific Islanders; and White. To reflect multiracial heritage, respondents were instructed to mark one or more categories (OMB, 2000). Ultimately, nearly 7 million (2.4 percent) of Americans described themselves as multiracial in the 2000 Census. Census officials claim that the number of interracial couples more than quadrupled between 1970 and 1995. The question of processes for counting and categorizing people identifying themselves as being of multiple races would be for the foreseeable future a question that the Census would have to consider.

Conclusion Since 1790, the U.S. Census has provided a count of this country’s population and an estimate of the general makeup of the population. The Census has also provided an overview of the construction of various categories of groups and the conversation underscoring such discourse on individual classification as related to group identity. The Census is more than an articulation or counting of a population; it is a social process. Specialists within the Census Bureau are engaged in determining what groups should be counted and how to count them. Members of various groups are engaged in various conversations about how they want to be categorized. Thus, social construction factors enter into the discourse in various ways, particularly as we consider what groups should be counted and how they should be counted. People are also engaged in the counting process itself. The result is numerous questions and issues pertaining to how the individuals involved in the counting might be engaged in the enumeration process. Resource distribution issues make our conceptualization of Census processes critical. How and where people are counted impact allocation of funds from various levels of government. Issues of identity are also impacted by Census issues—specifically, in terms of helping to understand who we are as a nation. Ultimately, the process of determining the differentiations upon which to base the counting and categorization helps in framing a process of classification that

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ultimately shapes notions of complexity around who makes up The Similar and The Other in an increasingly heterogeneous society.

Notes 1. David M. Heer, Social Statistics and the City: Report. (Cambridge, MA: Joint Center for Urban Studies of the Massachusetts Institute for Technology and Harvard University, 1968), 176. 2. National Research Council, America’s Uncounted People. (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1972), 57. 3. Ibid., 112.

13 The Immigrant as The Other—Part II

in the history of Los Angeles, more than half a million people poured onto the city’s streets in March 2006. Many of the protesters carried signs in English and Spanish about their contributions to American society; others carried flags of the United States, Mexico, El Salvador, and other nations. Several weeks later, on April 10, thousands of additional demonstrators filled the streets of New York, Atlanta, and Houston. These marches were several of many that occurred in support of individuals who had entered the United States in recent years. The marches provided for many of the participants an opportunity to make themselves visible to a public that had frequently seen many of them as simply the anonymous laborer in the garden, the kitchen, or the construction site. The marches were part of a national debate on a new immigration bill being discussed on Capitol Hill. The previous December, the House of Representatives passed House Resolution 4437, The Border Protection, AntiTerrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, which called for a number of actions to address what the bill’s proponents argued were threats to American society, many of which stemmed from immigration trends at the time. House Resolution 4437 was the indirect result of changes in the demographic makeup of numerous communities during the previous two decades, a period when the number of U.S. residents who had been born outside of the country increased from 14.1 million people to 31.1 million people. The debates surrounding HR 4437 raised questions about the makeup of American society in relation to the political and societal concerns that numerous polls indicated were at the forefront of Americans’ minds, including

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national and economic security. In many circles, the immigrant was becoming perceived as a potential economic and security threat, despite the fact that many new migrants played critical roles in the evolving economic and social fabric of their new communities. These conflicting views—the immigrant as a benefit or the immigrant as a burden and threat to a society—underscored much of the debate at the time. An examination of HR 4437 lends itself to a series of assumptions that it was created either in an era of negative perception or from the perspectives of individuals who may have held a negative image of the immigrant as The Other. It also raises questions about the role of identity within U.S. society. What does it mean, particularly in an era of rapid immigration, to be an American? An American identity shaped in a nation with numerous languages and cultural traditions is an American identity quite different from one shaped in the context of homogeneity. As a result, much of the debate of the era that has underscored images and policies stemming from the picture of the immigrant as The Other has been influenced by these questions about and challenges to issues of identity for immigrants and nonimmigrants within the United States. This chapter examines the emergent factors that underscore the image of the immigrant as The Other that led to and underscored much of the debate related to changing perspectives of immigration in a post-1965 era. Specifically, the various perspectives that led to and helped underscore HR 4437 are examined. I begin with a profile of both change and factors leading to change of the legislative framework that helped to shape the evolution of the images of the immigrant within the United States with an emphasis on the factors underscoring the immigrant debate in a post-1965 era. For much of this time period, there was a rapid liberalization of immigration policies that in turn resulted in a rapidly changing demographic base in many cities. I continue with an examination of demographic changes as they emerged within the context of such demographic shifts. Next, I present various late twentieth century and early twenty-first century neo-nativists’ perspectives about the immigrant as The Other that I argue ultimately impacted the policy discourse that helped to underscore HR 4437.

Immigration Reform Post-1950 In the latter half of the twentieth century, policies supporting limited immigration that had been in place since the passage of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act began to be confronted by a number of social, economic, and political realities that would lead to change. The Second World War released a flood of

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refugees and displaced persons who were in need of new homes and homelands. The concepts of liberty, antitotalitarianism, and freedom that guided much of the war—as well as the humanitarian impulses that emerged from the war—shaped much of the discourse on immigration in U.S. policymaking circles. In the years following the war, Congress debated what, if any, role the United States should play in serving as a place for those who had become displaced by the war. As a result, the 1948 Displaced Person Act was passed to enable 400,000 people who had lost their homes during the war to immigrate to the United States from Europe. This act signaled the beginning of a trend of increased immigration as a means of addressing many of the humanitarian concerns that emerged in the postwar era. It also led to the beginning of a period during which several U.S. immigration policies were slowly liberalized. The passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 removed racial bias against the naturalization of Japanese, Koreans, and other East Asians. The act also, however, retained the national origins system as a basis for immigration decisions. In vetoing the act, President Truman noted, “The idea behind this discriminatory policy was, to put it boldly, that Americans with English or Irish names were better people and better citizens than Americans with Italian or Greek or Polish names. . . . Such a concept is utterly unworthy of our traditions and our ideals.”1 However, the act passed over his veto. Several other laws passed during the 1950s further enabled people— particularly those displaced by crisis—to gain entry into the United States. The Refugee Relief Act of 1953 permitted 200,000 people, most of whom had fled from behind the Iron Curtain, to gain entry into the country. The 1958 Pastore-Kennedy-Walter Act enabled people of Dutch origin who had been in Indonesia to enter the United States above established limits and gave entry to Portuguese immigrants who had been displaced as a result of earthquakes in the Azores. In 1957, the Displaced Person Act and the Refugee Relief Act were passed, further creating opportunities for immigrants to enter the United States. The Kennedy amendment to the act permitted alien spouses and parents and children with inconsequential disqualification to enter the United States. A year following the passage of the 1957 immigration bills, Senator John Kennedy published A Nation of Immigrants, which presented to the general public a description of the contributions of immigrants to American life. As a senator representing Massachusetts, a state that at the time had the largest percentage of foreign-born people in the United States, Kennedy was particularly interested in matters pertaining to immigration. In the book, he pointed to various demographic trends related to immigration as well as to the contributions of various immigrants since the early years of U.S. society. Kennedy

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also recognized his own familial link to the immigrant experience. His greatgrandfather, Patrick Kennedy, had immigrated from Ireland in the 1800s, a fact that Kennedy noted in a 1963 visit to Ireland: “When my great-grandfather left here to become a cooper in East Boston, he carried nothing with him except a strong religious faith and a strong desire for liberty.” 2 Kennedy’s ascension into the presidency in 1960 enabled him to integrate his immigration agenda into the realm of presidential activities in the early 1960s. Two years after Kennedy’s assassination, Congress passed the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. This act replaced the national origins quota system with a uniform limit of 20,000 immigrants per country from countries outside of the Western Hemisphere. It also placed a limit on the number of immigrants from the Western Hemisphere, with an emphasis on immigrants from Mexico. As the act went into effect, it resulted in dramatic changes in the makeup of the nation, particularly as the number of people from other nations immigrating to the United States increased. Various global dynamics from the 1970s to the end of the century added to the legislative agenda on immigration and the resulting changes in immigrant demographics. In 1976, President Ford signed into law The Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1976, which were critical to opening up opportunities for people from the Western Hemisphere to immigrate to the United States. They placed a limit on the number of immigrants from the Western Hemisphere, equalized the process of transition from status of immigrant to lawful permanent resident for immigrants from the Eastern and Western hemispheres, and they extended coverage for refugees from Cuba under the Cuban Refugee Act of 1966. Most important was a Mexican-American family reunification component that provided preference in Mexican-American nationals who were close relatives of U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents. One concern that Ford noted during the signing of the act was that the 20,000 per country limit for nations in the Western Hemisphere would cut the number of legal Mexican immigrants— estimated at 40,000 at the time—in half. As he noted, “The United States has a very special and historic relationship with our neighbors to the south. In view of the status we have with the Mexican Government and the Mexican people, I will submit legislation to the Congress in January to increase the immigration quotas for Mexicans desiring to come to the United States.”3 Four years later, the Refugee Act of 1980 aligned U.S. refugee policy with international practice by expanding the definition of a refugee from someone fleeing a communist country to someone who feared persecution or physical harm. The law also entitled refugees to certain federal reimbursable social and medical services. By the mid 1980s, several groups began to express concern about the increased liberalization of immigration policies and their effect on the number of

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immigrants entering the United States. In 1985, for example, Colorado Governor Richard Lamm joined Gary Imhoff to call for more restrictive immigration policies in a book titled The Immigration Time Bomb. According to Lamm and Imhoff, immigration, particularly large-scale immigration, brings with it increased lawlessness, resource depletion, strife between various groups, unemployment for groups that have been in the country for a much longer period of time, and increased strain on social services within communities. For example, examining the role of immigrants in increasing the rate of crime in U.S. society, they noted, Our immigration policies are exacerbating our national epidemic of crime. The most striking recent example of that lawlessness was the 1980 Mariel boatlift. Almost all of the 127,000 Cuban illegal immigrants in the Mariel boatlift will be given special treatment and consideration for permanent resident alien status, yet there is good evidence that 40 percent of them were criminals or had histories of criminal behavior or of mental illness.4

They continue with their depiction of the immigrant as the cause of crime in communities, noting, It is probably true throughout the world that most immigrant groups commit crimes at a higher rate than the general population. And there are many reasons for this. Immigrants, after all, are displaced persons; many avenues of success in their new societies will be closed to them. They will have difficulties adjusting to their new countries and learning the language and the mores of their new societies, and they will encounter discrimination which could engender resentment and ill will toward their new country. Most immigrants will also be poor, and in all societies there is a higher incidence of crime among the poor.5

Lamm and Imhoff ’s book coincided with debate on the Immigration Reform Control Act of 1986, which was aimed at discouraging the flow of immigrants while compensating employers by liberalizing access to legal temporary workers. In 1990, legal immigration policy was again revised in the Immigration Act of 1990, which established a compromise between exclusionary and inclusionary forces for immigration. The act increased the admission of highly skilled immigrants. It reduced many of the limits on family-based immigration, further enabling families to bring members who had remained in their initial countries. It also permitted a temporary protected status for refugees from war-torn nations. Ten years following the publication of The Immigration Time Bomb, Britishborn author Peter Brimelow’s Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster (1995) was published. Appearing after California’s

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Proposition 187 and preceding the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act, the book served as an attack on the 1965 Immigration Act and resulting changes in the demographics of the nation. Brimelow’s concerns were focused primarily on Hispanic, and particularly Mexican immigrants, who Brimelow argued were the source of numerous social ills in the areas of health care, education, and crime. For example, in his analysis of the health care crisis, Brimelow said, We know that about 6 million of the 22 million U.S. Hispanics are uninsured at any one point. Since almost a third of U.S. Hispanics are foreign born, it’s obvious that immigrants and their children must be some and perhaps most of them. The hard core of uninsured, experts confirm, is substantially Hispanic. That probably includes many of the estimated nearly 2 million uninsured illegal immigrants permanently settled here, a heavily Hispanic group.6

Part of Brimelow’s concern stemmed from his observation that “the American nation has always had a specific ethnic core. And that core has been white.”7 A rise of immigrants from a number of places in the world presented a threat to his understanding of the makeup of the American nation. As he noted, For the first time, virtually all immigrants are racially distinct “visible minorities.” They come not from Europe, previously the common homeland even for the 1890–1920 immigrants about which Americans were so nervous. Instead, these new immigrants are from completely different, and arguably incompatible, cultural traditions. And, as we have seen, they are coming in such numbers that their impact on America is enormous—inevitably within the foreseeable future, they will transform it.8

Less than a decade following Brimelow’s Alien Nation, Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington’s 2004 book Who Are We: The Challenge to America’s National Identity argued that the Anglo-Protestant foundation of U.S. identity is rapidly crumbling due to a rapid influx of immigrants, particularly from Mexico. According to Huntington, Americans should recommit themselves to the Anglo-Protestant culture, traditions, and values that for three and a half centuries have been embraced by Americans of all races, ethnicities, and religions and that have been the source of their liberty, unity, power, prosperity, and moral leadership as a force for good in the world.9

For Huntington, much of the threat to the role of Anglo-Protestant culture in the United States comes from waves of immigrants coming across our southern border. He devotes one chapter to what he views as the largest threat:

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the “Hispanization” of American culture as a result of Mexican immigration. He paints this process as a reconquest of territories that America claimed from Mexico during the Mexican-American Wars of 1835–1836 and 1846–1848. Huntington argues that Mexico is taking these lands back, through a demographic shift that he portrays as a form of conquest. He observes, Mexican-Americans, in turn, argue that the Southwest was taken from them by military aggression in the 1840s, and that the time for la reconquista has arrived. Demographically, socially, and culturally that is well under way.10

Huntington describes the demographics of many of the cities on many of the U.S. borders as overwhelmingly Hispanic, noting a 2000 article from The Economist that reported that half of the major cities on the U.S. side of the border were witnessing a rapid increase in their Hispanic populations.11 Such a demographic shift, he argues, leads to further difficulty in assimilating Mexican-Americans with the Anglo-Protestant roots of Huntington’s version of the American culture. He observes, As their numbers increase, Mexican-Americans feel increasingly comfortable with their own culture and often contemptuous of American culture. They demand recognition of their culture and the historic Mexican identity of the American Southwest. They increasingly call attention to and celebrate their Hispanic and Mexican past.12

Huntington challenges a passage in Lionel Sosa’s book The American Dream, in which Sosa advises Hispanic entrepreneurs that an Americano dream exists “and is there for all of us to share.” Huntington responds, He is wrong. There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English.13

The cycle of debate related to immigration, from Lamm and Imhoff, to Brimelow, and finally to Huntington, provides an overview of the patterns related to the engagement of various immigrant populations in society. According to each of the authors noted, the recent immigrant brought with him or her a number of challenges that the United States, as the absorbing society would have to address. The positionality of these authors as experts within the wider society helped to frame some of the perspectives that led to calls for immigration reform. Lamm’s role as governor of Colorado helped to frame a perspective of the expert as the representative of the public’s perception. Brimhoff ’s role as the editor of a widely circulated magazine and Huntington’s role as a Harvard

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University scholar also helped to shape the image of the expert, thus influencing the public’s opinion on immigration. These authors and others present several arguments for limiting immigration, sealing our borders, and criminalizing certain populations of immigrants. They help to paint an image of the immigrant, particularly the Mexican immigrant, as The Other. Their Other is someone who comes across the border, most often illegally, and drains public and other resources. Their immigrant Other brings with him or her a degree of crime. Placed within the context of what Huntington refers to as the Hispanization of American society, the immigrant as The Other stands in direct contrast to the AngloProtestant norm that Huntington and the other authors argue provided the foundation for American society.

Political/Administrative Reactions By the year 2000, foreign-born U.S. residents had grown to 11 percent of the total population, up from 4.7 percent in 1970. Authors depicting the immigrant as The Other had a numerical basis upon which to base their arguments. Fear of the immigrant Other manifested in political and administrative actions in numerous ways in the period stretching from the mid 1990s to the early years of the twenty-first century. Policies during this period shifted from increased liberalization of immigration laws to increased barriers to immigration. In California, reaction to the waves of immigrants, particularly from Mexico, led to the passage of Proposition 187 in 1994. This state proposition, which was referred to as the “Save Our State” proposal, was the brainchild of Californians Alan Nelson and Harold Ezell, former commissioners of the Immigration and Naturalization Services. Proposition 187 signaled to the rest of the nation that there was a general mood of dissatisfaction with our immigration policies. In some ways, it represented the growth of an antiforeign spirit throughout the nation. Two years following the passage of Proposition 187, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act began to set limitations on the flow of immigrants. It reduced the number of benefits legal immigrants could receive (including food stamps and welfare payments), expanded criminal penalties related to immigration, and increased income requirements for individuals sponsoring immigrants. More importantly, it signaled that the political mood in the nation was beginning to adhere to many of the depictions being presented of the immigrant as The Other. Two images of the immigrant drove much of the debate on immigration reform in 2005 and 2006. Examining the title of The Border Protection, Anti-

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Terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act points to the image of The Other as conceptualized by the act’s designers. The first element of the title, “Border Protection,” suggests that The Other that we need to be concerned about is one who is coming across the border into the United States. Engaging in border protection suggests that we are protecting ourselves against something or someone. It also suggests a fear or concern about the potential impact of such a group getting within our borders. The second component of the act’s title, “AntiTerrorism,” connects to fears about the immigrant in the context of post-9/11 terrorism concerns, thus suggesting a link in the minds of policymakers between terrorism and antiimmigrant policies. The most immediate justifications for such a connection surfaced when the events of September 11, 2001, exposed some of the flaws in the U.S. immigration system. Several of the hijackers used fraudulent passports and falsely obtained visas or violated the terms of their visas. Finally, the third element, “Immigration Control,” suggests a need to enhance the limits of control of immigration. Controls advocated within the policy context included the building of both physical controls—such as a fence across the U.S./Mexican border—and a revision of numerous policies and procedures related to immigration processes. We have then, within the context of the policy framework that emerged, established a context for conceptualizing the immigrant Other, and a context that unless there is a rapid shift in discourse will continue to frame popular perception and continued policy frameworks.

Conclusion The second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twentyfirst century witnessed an active debate on matters pertaining to immigration in U.S. society. Within the debates surfaced numerous perspectives of the notion of the immigrant as The Other. The challenge facing those of us involved in political/administrative discourse is to reexamine the discussions related to the immigrant as The Other—in particular, should the image of the immigrant as The Other be shaped according to these negative images, or might there be alternate images worthy of exploration? Much of the debate has ignored some of the benefits that various immigrant groups might bring into communities, such as increased economic growth and a richer social fabric within various communities. Within this examination is an exploration of various perspectives related to immigration. At its core is the question of how we might reframe the discussion of the immigrant as The Other. Instead of examining immigrant groups

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as a drain on society, what would happen if we focused on leveraging the talents of individuals from various groups? The imagery of the immigrant as The Other during the time period examined in much of this chapter—and leading to the debates surrounding HR 4437—has numerous parallels to early twentieth century immigration debate that led to the passage of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. Those parallels help to frame numerous questions related to depictions of the immigrant as The Other and the corresponding development of political and administrative responses. Conversations limiting access, economic limitations, safety, and other factors surfaced in each time period. The revisiting of the conversations in these ways reflected a discussion of the repetition of the cyclical nature of the policy process particularly in relation to immigration and notions of The Other.

Notes 1. John F. Kennedy, A Nation of Immigrants. (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 78. 2. Ibid., xiii. 3. Gerald Ford, Statement on Signing the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1976. Retrieved on May 18, 2008 from www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/ index.php?pid=6495. 4. Richard Lamm and Gary Imhoff, The Immigration Time Bomb: The Fragmenting of America. (New York: Truman Talley, 1985), 49. 5. Ibid., 54. 6. Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation: Common Sense about America’s Immigration Disaster. (New York: Random House, 1995), 8. 7. Ibid., 10. 8. Ibid., 56. 9. Samuel Huntington, Who Are We: The Challenge to America’s National Identity. (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2004), xvii. 10. Ibid., 246. 11. Ibid., 247. 12. Ibid., 255. 13. Ibid., 256.

Conclusion Reconciliation with The Other

AUGUST and early September 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina opened the eyes of people around the world to America’s dualities. We are a nation of incredible wealth, and we are a nation of tremendous poverty. Despite the numerous advances of the civil rights and post–civil rights era, our society still suffers from deep-seated disparities related to race and class. Through much of the post-Katrina discourse, many questions with implications for our exploration of this notion of The Other arose. What should those who left New Orleans be called? Some media outlets referred to them as victims or survivors, others as refugees; each term paints a distinct image. Where should people be housed after leaving the region? Victims or survivors of Katrina would find themselves settled in communities that—for a short time, at least—would welcome them. Refugees of Katrina would find themselves in trailer camps that would serve as places that, for at least a year, would essentially hide them from much of the rest of society. Two years following Katrina, President Bush made no mention of the hurricane in his State of the Union Address, and the Democrats made no mention of it in their response to his speech. Would Katrina have left the public consciousness—or at least what appeared to be the president’s agenda—if those who were often viewed as the primary victims had not been conceptualized as Others, particularly poor and African American Others? Despite the absence of Katrina victims, survivors, or refugees from their discourse, the President and members of Congress from both parties did, however, continue to make references to another group. Largely as a result of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq,

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new images of The Other began to develop. To help create a common image of an enemy against whom efforts could be mobilized, the notion of the terrorist—often depicted as someone from the Middle East—increasingly entered in public discourse. Several experts have added to the terms that depict the image of the Middle Easterner as the terrorist Other. As the second gulf war progressed, U.S. politicians struggled with identifying a way to define an image of the Middle Easterners whom they were increasingly painting as The Other. Increasingly during the era, the concept of “Islamofascism” found itself introduced in several policy arenas as a way of defining those who were involved in terrorism. Sadly, such simplification affects many individuals beyond those whom we find ourselves confronting. In each of these instances, perspectives on The Other have emerged and have in turn shaped administrative policy and practice in the United States. My core goal in developing Administration and The Other has been to encourage more active reflection on the processes that have framed groups of Others. Further reflection on and understanding of the implications of such framing will influence our development of policies and practices in ways that would lead to a more just society.

Sameness and The Other Cesare Lombroso’s work in the late nineteenth century helped to frame a process of typification. His science of criminology facilitated the development of processes of identifying who criminals were, and often the type identified paralleled many of the growing numbers of immigrant groups in the United States. Such a science of classification helped in the development of understanding within various circles of assumptions held about particular groups of people. Lombroso’s role, as well as the roles of numerous other specialists at the time, helped facilitate notions of type that emerged. Throughout much of the development of the field of public administration, another process has paralleled the development of type. Early in the twentieth century, type helped in the development of anti-immigrant policies and several of the studies related to eugenics. It also helped sustain policies reflecting the political and administrative ambivalence of the lynching era in the United States. Today, it still has an impact upon the perception we have of children in particular schools, residents of particular communities, or recipients of particular services. In several chapters, I have attempted to provide examples of how various groups were typified. The constitutional framers, particularly those involved

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with advocating for the federal system we have in place, helped to shape the notion of sameness. The image of American identity, proposed by Jay in his Federalist Two, and noted by Huntington slightly more than two hundred years later, articulated a notion of identity built on commonality. These framers were also able to build such notions of commonality to shape concepts of difference or Otherness that were used for separate groups. The evolution of administrative responses to northern migration provides one of the greatest implications of the role of the forces related to administrative reactions to The Other. The examination of housing policy in Chicago provides an example of the reactions to a group and the framing of policy response to such reactions. Many African Americans became the segregated Other, with institutions built—in the case of Chicago, concentrated public housing—for situating members of this group. The War on Poverty and patterns of response in the reform of welfare policies were structured in a framework that contextualized large numbers of lower-income African Americans as the faces of America’s poor and urbanized Other. One might argue that even today, when a disproportionate percentage of African Americans are incarcerated, that perhaps what has emerged is a continual process for the setting aside of marginalized groups in U.S. society. Perhaps then, the institutionalized process Foucault suggested with the development of the Hôpital Général is a process that we have repeated with subsequent groups of Others.

Experts, Intellectuals, and The Other Throughout Administration and The Other, I have attempted to identify various contributors to policy discourse at various stages of the development of our Republic. Some of these individuals would fall within the framework of the expert, others within the framework of the intellectual. Who are the experts in discourse on The Other? What is the interplay between them and the intellectual in shaping and challenging notions of The Other? I have presented several cases under which the interplay between the expert and the intellectual has helped underscore the complexity of policy. Thomas Paine’s perspectives as the marginal man—whose marginality placed him in a continual role of questioning the society and notions of equality and liberty espoused by the Enlightened specialist of the constitutional era— provides one example. Paine not only helped articulate notions of liberty that appeared to the common man, he also challenged notions of espoused versus enacted notions of liberty, particularly when examined in the context of the reality of slavery during the era.

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The exchange between those calling for change and those arguing for sustaining the status quo exemplifies the discourse between the intellectual and the expert pertaining to The Other. The expert seeks to maintain the conditions that support The Same and The Other. The intellectual seeks to change or, at minimum, to question such conditions. There is a vital role for both the expert and the intellectual in any society, particularly in the context of constructing the image and the role of The Other in a society. The expert can help to institutionalize perceptions and roles, including those of The Other. The intellectual challenges these institutions and roles. The marketization and competition within information sources has led to a market of experts. As a result, as we reflect upon the role of the specialist in creating The Other, we need to reflect on the reality of the image and process that underscores such creation.

Framing a Discourse on The Other The state in most situations is in a movement to a far greater cosmopolitan mix than has been experienced societally thus far. One of the challenges related to this cosmopolitanism is how we deal with differences among the people who make up a society. For individuals studying the roles of political and administrative actors, there is a role in navigating such difference. Much of the strategy for doing so can be found in framing and engaging in a discourse related to various elements of the society being continually reified. Habermasian notions of communicative interaction, particularly with their underlying commitments to shared understanding as a basis for action, are crucial. As Habermas notes there is a role for reflection on and engagement of The Other in discourse and the framing of policy based on discourse: Equal respect for everyone is not limited to those who are like us; it extends to the person of the other in his or her otherness. And solidarity with the other as one of us refers to the flexible “we” of a community that resists all substantive determinations and extends its permeable boundaries even further. This moral community constitutes itself solely by way of the negative idea of abolishing discrimination and harm and of extending relationships of mutual recognition to include marginalized men and women. The community thus constructively outlined is not a collective that would force its homogenized members to affirm its distinctiveness. Here inclusion does not imply locking members into a community that closes itself off from others. The “inclusion of the other” means rather

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that the boundaries of the community are open for all, also and most especially for those who are strangers to one another and want to remain strangers.1

Such inclusion brings us back to the questions raised by the social constructivists on how we frame a notion of The Other and to the questions on the dynamics of the expert and the intellectual in building institutions and articulating the challenges to such institutions.

New Political/Administrative State Building The institutions that provide the framework for our societies are all socially constructed. They emerge from a context that in time provides much of their legitimacy. There is within this framework a construction process that helps to shape these various perspectives and realities. Creation process for framing the type of society that we would like to see is something that we can all engage in as part of the means of policy development. James Madison recognized in the years following the adoption of the Articles of Confederation that there is an active process one can assume in state building. His notion of an ideal state was built on a centralized state. Much of his work in articulating a vision of this more centralized state placed him in a critical role in shaping what would become the constitutional process. What emerged from Madison’s discussions with other constitutional framers was a process of defining a state that would include and exclude various groups from the framing discourse. Although the initial institutions did exclude large numbers of those who were living in the nation at the time, the years since have provided opportunities for many of the previously excluded to become part of an engaged polity. We have seen improved inclusion, but there is clearly much more that can be done to ensure inclusion; active reflection on some of the questions related to otherness and sameness in the development of policy and the institutions of governance is one place to start. State building is a continual endeavor and a process that ideally engages numerous participants from different backgrounds. “In speaking of the Negro, we do not speak of ‘them,’” noted the Kerner Commission in its report. “We speak of us—for the freedom and opportunities of all Americans are diminished and imperiled when they are denied to some Americans. The tragic waste of human spirit and resources, the unrecoverable loss to the nation which this denial has already caused—and continues to produce—no longer can be ignored or afforded.”2 The challenge proposed by the Kerner Commission is one of ensuring that, as we think about the development of

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future political and administrative systems, we reflect on the inclusion of all stakeholders, with a goal of maximizing the potential of everyone included in our systems.

Counterfactualism and Critical Consciousness At times, historians will engage in a process referred to as counterfactuals: exploring what could have happened if certain situations hadn’t occurred. I have presented only a handful of cases examining the political and administrative interplay in relation to The Other. There are literally hundreds of other cases, both historical and contemporary, with an undercurrent of issues pertaining to The Other. There will most certainly be many more. Each of these cases provides ample opportunity to pose counterfactuals to assess what potential outcomes would have been if different policies affecting Others had been implemented. What might have been the impact if political and administrative systems spoke out against the reality of the thousands of African American men who fell victim to lynch mobs? Had Robert Taylor and others trying to build more equitable approaches to housing during the northern migration succeeded in their administrative battles, could they have altered later discourse on poverty and welfare in communities across the nation? What models of coexistence might have emerged had Andrew Jackson not received support for the Land Removal Acts? The ability to pose such counterfactuals is predicated on the ability to better frame notions of The Other about whom policies are being developed. By asking questions of what might have been, we are better positioned to ask questions of what might be. There is not in political and administrative processes, as we have come to understand and acknowledge them, a means for exploring the mechanisms of framing The Other. We have not explored a process for shaping the assumptions related to various discussions for and with various groups, and the identities related to such groups. How might we change the conversation—or at least how the conversation is structured—on a number of policy issues and perspectives pertaining to The Other? How do we engage large segments of the population, including the traditionally disengaged and the engaged, in conversations pertaining to The Other? We need to think about The Other much more than we do, particularly if we are in roles that enable us to influence policy or the makers of policy. Doing so can be the beginning of a process that will ultimately frame future opinions and realities for all living in and shaping a nation in which we can all feel a degree of inclusion in a society that is all of ours.

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Notes 1. Jurgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other. (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1998), xxxvi–xxxvii. 2. United States National Commission on Civil Disorders, Report of the National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968), 33–34.

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Index

1641 Colonial Act of Massachusetts, 32 1790 Census, 144 1790 Census Act, 141 1880 Census, 59, 76 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, xviii, 58 1906 State of the Union, 73 1913 Income Tax Act, xx 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, xx 1934 Housing Act, 89 1935 Social Security Act, 128, 131 1948 Displaced Person Act, 148 1949 Federal Housing Act, 90 1949 Housing Act, xxi 1954 Housing Act, 91 1964 Civil Rights Act, 142 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, 150 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act, 152 2000 Census, 145 Act X of the Statute of 1639, 31 Adams, Herbert, 72 Adams, John, 19 Addams, Jayne, 80 Addonizio, Hugh, 106

The Affluent Society, 97 Afghanistan, xiii African(s), 26, 28 African American, xi, xvi, xx, xviii, 10, 11, 73, 89, 91, 93, 104, 105, 115, 120, 129, 133, 136 Africanus, 28 Aid for Dependent Children, 129 Aid to Dependent Children, 130 Aid to Families with Dependent Children, 130, 132 Airport Homes, 91 Alabama, 48 Albany Register, 17 Alien Nation, 151–52 America, 20 American, 26 The American Dream, 153 American Economic Association, 58, 60 American Historical Association, 56 American Journal of Sociology, 61 American Museum of Natural History, 82 American Political Science Association, 65 American Sociological Society, 62

— 177 —

178

Index

American Statistical Association, 58 Americanus, 28 America’s Uncounted People, 143–44 Amherst, Jeffrey, 41 Anglican Church, 20 Annual Academy of Political and Social Science, 62 Antifederalist, xvi, 19 Applachian poor, 109 Arkansas, 130 Article One, Section Two, 140 The Articles of Confederation, 23, 30 Aryan, 62 Asiaticus, 28 Atlantic Monthly, 58, 64, 71, 76 Battle of Bunker Hill, 33 Battle of Concord, 33 Battle of Lexinton, 33 Beard, Charles, xvi Because it is Right Educationally, 118 The Bell Curve, 134 Berger, Peter, 10, 8 Beverly, Robert, 38 Bill of Rights, 23 The Birth of a Nation, viii, 73 blaming the victim, 106 Body of Liberties, 32 Border Protection, Anti-Terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, 147, 154 Boston, xxi, 21, 115, 117–18 Boston Massacre, 33 Boston NAACP, 118 Boston School Committee, 116, 118–120 Boston Tea Party, 33 Bowdoin, James. See Governor Bowdoin Brant, Joseph, 41 Brimelow, Peter, 151, 153 Britain, 18 British, 32 Brodhead, Daniel, 42 Brown v. Board of Education, xviii, 113–15 Burguess, John, 63

Burr, Aaron, 17, 20 Byrd, Robert, 131 Cabrini Green, 93 Caldwell, James, 33 California, xii, 135 Campbell, Thomas, 42 Canaan, 27 Candler, John S., 70 capitivity narrative, 40 Capitol Hill, 147 Captain Ecuyer, 41 Carolinas, 19 Carroll, Charles, 71, 73 Cartesian, 6 case poverty, 97 The Causes of Race Superiority, 62 CBS News–New York Times Poll, 136 Celto-Slav, 62 Census, xii, xxi Central and Eastern Europe. See Europe, Central and Eastern Central High School, 115 Central Ward, 106 Charlestown, 34 Charlotte, North Carolina, 115 Cherokee, 47–48 Cherokee Nation, 47 Chicago, Illinois, xxi, 75, 88 Chicago Housing Authority, 91-92 Chickasaw, 48 Chief Justice Marshall, 48 Chinese, 81 Chinese Exclusion Act, 81 Choctaw, 48–49 Christianity, 47 Civil War, American, xvi, 63 The Clansman, 72 Classical era, 3 Clinton, Bill, 136 Clinton, George, 43 Cold Springs Harbor, 82 Collins, F. S., xii colonial era, xix, 26, 28 Columbia University, 63

Index

Columbian Magazine, 29 Commission on Civil Disorders, 108 Commission on Civil Rights, 143 Committee on Difficult to Enumerate Groups, 142 Committee on Equal Opportunity, 142 Committee to Investigate the Negroes, 58 common man, 19 Common Sense, 20 Community Action Agencies, 108–9 Community Action Program, 102 Confederation, 21 Constitution, xix, 23, 30. See also U.S. Constitution Constitutional Convention, 22 constitutional era, 28, 159 constitutional framers, 27 Cooper, 2 Cooper v. Aaron, 115 Cornell, 58 Council of Economic Advisors, 100 Counting the Forgotten, 144 Creek Nation, 45 Creeks, 48 Criminal Man, 79 Cuban Refugee Act of 1966, 150 Culture of Poverty, 97 Czolgasz, Leon, 80 Daley, Richard, 93 Dancing Rabbit Creek, 48 Darwin, 56 Davenport, Charles, 82 Death at an Early Age, 120 Declaration of Independence, 20, 23, 116 Declaration of Rights in Massachusetts’ 1780 Constitution, 33 Department of Labor, 101 depression of 1893–1896, 57 Descartes, 3 Descent of Man, 56 Dickens, Charles, 98 Dillingham Commission, 81–82 Dillingham, William Paul, 81

179

Directive 15, 144 Displaced Person Act, 149 Division and Reunion, 64 Dixon, Thomas, 72–73 Douglas Report, 99 Douglas, Paul, 99 Duane, James, 43 Du Bois, W. E. B., xi Duffey-Lancaster, 92 Dunbar, Charles, 56 Dutch, 149 Dynamic Sociology, 61 Economic Opportunity Act, 102–3 Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, 96 “Economic Science in America,” 56 The Economist, 153 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 115 Ely, Richard, 56 Ely, Thomas, 72 Emancipation Proclamation, xi Emergency Relief and Construction Act, 89 England, 20 English, xvi, 34, 147 enlightenment, 18, 27 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 142 eugenics, 82 Europanus, 28 Europe: Central and Eastern, xvii; Southern, 62 European(s), 26, 28 Everett, Edward, 44 Executive Order 10925, 142 Executive Order 11246, 142 Executive Order 9066, xviii Ezell, Harold, 154 Farmer, James, 105 Faubus, Orval, 115 Federal Housing Administration, 89–90 Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, 89 Federalist, xvi

180

Index

Federalist 10, 17, 19 Federalist 35, 21 Federalist Papers, 22 Federalist Two, 22, 159 Fernwood Park, 91 First World War, vii Florida, 34 Folkways, 60 Ford Foundation, 104 Ford, Gerald, 150 Ford, Henry Jones, 65 Foucault, Michel, 2–4, 159 Founding era of public administration, xx Fourth Police District, 107 France, 2, 11 Franklin, Benjamin, xvi Frederick Douglas, 35 French and Indian War, 40 French and Indian Cruelty Exemplified, in the Life and Various Vicissitudes of Fortune of Peter Williamson, 40 Galbreith, John Kenneth, xxi, 97 Galton, Francis, 82 Garrity, W. Arthur, 121 Genesis, 26–27 Genesis 9:18:27, 27–28 Georgia, 47 German, xvi Germans, 28 Gertrude of Wyoming, 42 GI Bill, 103 Gilens, Martin, 103 Goldman, Emma, 80 Goode Newes From Virginia, 39 Governor Bowdoin, 21 Governor Harrison, 44 Grant, Madison, 81–83 Great Awakening, 19 Great Chain of Being, 27 Great Depression, 127–28 Greek philosophy, 27 Greenwald, xii Griffith, David, viii Gulf Coast, xiii

Habermas, Jurgen, 160 Hall, Prescott, 81 Ham, 27 Hamilton, Alexander, 17, 20 Hansberry, Lorraine, 87 Harper, John, 42 Harrington, Michael, xxi, 98 Harrison, William Henry. See Governor Harrison Harvard University, 44, 117 Harvard Divinity School, 117 Harvest of Shame, 99 Hassinuga, 37 Haymarket Square, 79 Heidegger, xix Heller, Walter, 100 Hennigan, James, 120 Henry Horner Homes, 93 Heritage Foundation, The, 135 Herrnstein, Richard. See Herrnstein and Murray Herrnstein and Murray, 134–35 Hicks, Louise Day, 118 History of America, 41 History of Jamaica, 29 Hoffman, Frederick, 58, 60 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 62 Hoover, Herbert , 129 Hope VI, 93 Hopital General, 2, 11, 159 House of Representatives, 140, 147 House Resolution 4437, 147–148 House Ways and Means Committee, 129 How The Other Half Lives, xviii, 77 Howard University, 71 Hull House, 80 Human Genome Project, xii humanism, xiv Hume, David, 27–28 Humphrey, Hubert, 99 Huntington, Samuel, 152, 159 Hurricane Katrina, xiii, xviii, xxiii, 157 Husserl, Edmund, 6

Index

Ideology and Utopia, 7 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act, 154 Imhoff, Gary, 151, 153 Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1976, 150 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, 149 Immigration Law of 1891, 81 Immigration Reform Control Act of 1986, 151 Immigration Restriction League, 81 The Immigrant Time Bomb, 151 “Indian Problem,” 44 Indian Removal Act, xvi, 47–48 Inquiries into Human Faculty and Development, 82 Institute for Research on Poverty, 104 institutionalization, 10 insular poverty, 97 Iraq, xiii Iroquois, 41 Islamofascism, 158 Jackson, Andrew, 45-47; administration of, 28 Jamaica, 28 Jamestown, xix, 30, 35, 38 Japanese Americans, xviii Japheth, 27 Jay, John, 22–23, 159. See also Publius Jefferson, Thomas, 29, 43–44 Jennison v. Caldwell, 1781, 33 Jennison, Nathaniel, 33 Jim Crow, 87, 89 Johns Hopkins University, 65, 72 Johnson, Guy, 41 Johnson, Lyndon B., 95, 100, 108, 110, 142 Johnson Reed Act of 1924, 82, 148 Johnson, Richard, 40 Kant, Immanuel, 28 Katrina. See Hurricane Katrina Kennedy, John F., 96, 99, 110, 142, 149

Kennedy, Patrick, 150 Kerner Commission, 108, 161 Kerner, Otto, 108 Kerrigan, John, 121 Keyes v. School District No. 1, Denver, Colorado, 115 Kiernan Commission, 118–119 Kiernan Report, 119 King v. Smith, 132 King, Jr., Martin Luther, 105 Knox, Henry, 43 Kozol, Jonathan, 120 Ku Klux Klan, 72 La Peyrere, Isaac, 26, 28, 71 Lamarck, 82 Lamm, Richard, 151, 153 Land Removal Acts, 162 League of Nations, vii Lee, Joseph, 119–20 Lenni Lenapes, 41 The Leopard’s Spots, 72 Letter on Humanism, xix Lewis, Oscar, 97 Liberal-Progressive, 80 Lies My Teacher Told Me, vii lifeworld, 9 Linnaeus, Carl, 28 Little Rock, Arkansas, 115 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 81 Lombroso, Cesare, 79, 158 London Council, 39 Long, Edward, 29 Los Angeles, California, 147 Louisiana Purchase of 1803, 44 Lowell, A. Lawrence, 81 Lowell, Abbott Lawrence, 65 Lowen, James, vii, viii Luckmann, Thomas, 8, 10 MacDonald, Dwight, 98 Madison, James, 21, 161 Madness and Civilization, 2–3 Magnalia Christi Americana, 40 Manahoal, 37

181

182

Index

Manheim, Karl, 7 Mansoura, xii marginal economics, 57 Marshall, Alfred, 57 Marshall, Thurgood. See Chief Justice Marshall Maryland, 32 Massachusetts, 32–33, 44, 149 Massachusetts Bay Colony, 38 Massachusetts General Court, 32 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 76 Massachusetts State Board of Education, 118 Massachusetts Supreme Court, 34 Mather, Cotton, 40 Maugham, W. Somerset, 1, 12 Mayor Kennelly, 92 McClure’s Magazine, 75 McDonough, John, 121 McKinley, William, 80 The Melting Pot, 80 men of reason, 19 Mendelian genetics, 82 Mexican American Wars, 153 Mexico, xxi Miamis, 41 Middle East, 5 Middle Eastern, xiii, xxiii Miller, Kelly, 71 Minneapolis, Minnesota, 75 Mississippi, 44 Mississippi River, 45 Mitchell, Joseph, 132 Mohawk, 42 Mongos, 41 Monroe, James, 45 “Monster Brant,” 42 Morgan v. Hennigan, 121 Morgan, Tallulah, 120 Morris, Gouverneur, 19 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, xxi, 104, 106 The Mulatto Factor in the Race Problem, 58 Murray, Charles. See Herrnstein and Murray

Murrow, Edward, R., 99 Muslims, xiii NAACP, 115 The Nation, 105 A Nation of Immigrants, 149 National Academy of Sciences, 144 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. See NAACP. National Research Council, 143 Native American, xvi, xix, 11, 37–49 The Negro in Africa and America, 58 The Negro a Beast of in the Image of God, 71 “negro dilemma,” 70 The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, 104 Nelson, Alan, 154 New Deal, 89, 97 New England, 18 New Orleans, xiii New York, New York, 75, 82 The New York Times, 99, 107 New Yorker, 98–99 Newark, New Jersey, 106 Newburgh, New York, 131 Newsweek, 133 Nisbet, Robert, 101 Nixon, Richard, 109, 134 Noah, 27 North American Review, 44, 46, 56 northern migration, xviii, xxi Northwest Ordinance of 1787, 43 Notes on the State of Virginia, 29 Nova Brittania, 40 “Observations of the Gradation in the scale of Being Between the Human and Brute Creation Including Some Curious Particulars Respecting Negroes,” 29 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, 28 O’Connor, William, 19

Index

183

“Of National Characters,” 27 Office of Economic Opportunity, 96, 103, 109 Office of Management and Budget, 145 Office of Management and Budget Directive Number 15, 144 Office of the Superintendent of Immigration, 81 Old World in the New, 78 Onondago, 43 Ontoponea, 37 Orang-outang, Sive, Homo sylvestris, or, The Anatomy of a Pygmie Compared with That of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man, 27 The Order of Things, 3–4 Ordinance of 1785, 43 O’Reilly Hotel, 73 Orient, 5 oriental, 5 orientalism, 4 Origin of Species, 56 Osborne, Henry, 82–83 The Other America, 98–99 Ottawa, 41

positionality, 5 Powhatan Confederacy, 38 President Clinton. See Clinton, Bill President Eisenhower. See Eisenhower, Dwight D President Ford. See Ford, Gerald President Johnson. See Johnson, Lyndon B. President Kennedy. See Kennedy, John F. President McKinley. See McKinley, William President Monroe. See Monroe, James President Nixon. See Nixon, Richard Price, Daniel, 141 Principles of Economics, 57 Progressive Era, xviii, xx, 70 Proposition 187, 152, 154 Proposition 54, xii Prudential Insurance, 58 Publius, 22 puritanical, 18, 38 Puritans, 38

Paine, Thomas, 18–19, 20, 23, 159 Paris, Texas, 69 Parliament, 20 The Passing of the Great Race, 82 Pastore-Kennedy-Walter Act, 149 Patriot Act, xiii Pendleton Act, xx Pennsylvania, xvi Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, 128, 136–37 Phenomology of the Social World, 7 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 20, 22, 75 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 75 Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System, 104 Plessy v. Ferguson, 114, 116 Plessy, Homer, 114 Pontiac, 41

Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, 58 Racial Imbalance Act of 1965, 119 A Raisin in the Sun, 87 The Razor’s Edge, 1 Reconstruction, viii, xvi, 63–65 Reconstruction and Constitution, 63 Reconstruction Finance Corporation, 89 Rector, Robert, 135 Refugee Act of 1980, 150 Refugee Relief Act of 1953, 149 Republic, xix “The Restriction of Immigration,” 76 Revolutionary era, xix, 28 Revolutionary War, 21, 32, 41 Reynolds v. Smith, 133 Riis, Jacob, xviii, 77–78 Robert Taylor Homes, 93 Roberts v. City of Boston, 116

Quest for Community, 101 Quixano, David, 80

184

Roberts, Benjamin, 116 Roberts, Sarah, 116 Robertson, William, 41 Rolfe, John, 25, 30 Roosevelt, Franklin D., xviii, 129 Roosevelt, Franklin, Jr., 100 Roosevelt, Theodore, 62, 73, 82–83 Ross, Edward A., 61, 78 Ryan, James, 105 Said, Edward, 4–6 Saratoga Springs, New York, 56–57 Savage Discovery, 105 “Save Our State,” 154 Schler, Max, 7 Schutz, Alfred, 7–8 Scotch Presbyterian, 75 Second Great Migration, 87 Second Gulf War, 158 Second World War, xviii, 97 Seminoles, 45 Senate Finance Committee, 129 Senate Resolution 39, 74 Shame of Cities, 75 Shapiro v. Thomas, 133 Shaw, Lemuel, 116 Shays, Daniel, 21 Shay’s Rebellion, xvi, 22 Shem, 27 Sledd, Andrew, 71 Smith Grammar School, 116 Smith, Henry, 69 Smith, John, 38–39; 106 Smith, Sylvester, 133 The Social Construction of Reality, 8 Social Control, 61–62 Social Security Act, 130 The Society of Friends, 20 Sosa, Lionel, 153 The Souls of Black Folks, xi South Carolina, 34–35, 130 Southern Europe. See Europe Spanish, 147 Spencer, Herbert, 60 St. Augustine, Florida, 34

Index

St. Louis, Missouri, 75 Stateway Gardens, 93 Steffans, Lincoln, 75 Stone, Alfred Holt, 58, 60 Stono uprising, 35 Stono, South Carolina, 34 Structures of the Life World, 8 The Study of Administration, vii, xx Sullivan, John, 42 Sumner, Charles, 116 Sumner, William Graham, 60-61 Superdome, xiii Supreme Court, 48, 73, 116 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 115 TANF. See Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Tartars, 28 Taxnitania, 37 Taylor, Robert, 92, 162 Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), 136 Thayendanega, 41 Theological Systeme Upon the Presupposition That Men Were Before Adam, 26 Tillinghast, Joseph, 58–60 Time, 133 Title IV of the Social Security Act, 130 Truman administration, 92 Tucker v. Sweeney, 31 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 76 typification, 10 Tyson, Edward, 27 The Ultimate Race Problem, 71 U.S. Census Bureau, 58. See also United States Census U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 121 U.S. Constitution, 47, 140 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 93 U.S. District Court, 120 U.S. Housing Administration, 92

Index

U.S. News and World Reports, 133 United Nations, vii United States, xxxvii, 26, 147 United States Census, 139–45. See also U.S. Census United States Immigration Commission, 81 University of Florida, 71 University of Wisconsin–Madison, 104 The Vantage Point, 101 Virginia, 18, 30, 32, 38 Virginia Assembly, 31 Virginia Colony, 25 Wagner Housing Act of 1937, 90 Walker v. Jennison, 1783, 34 Walker, Francis, 76 Walker, Quock, 33 War of 1812, 47 War on Poverty, xxi, 96, 109, 128 Ward, Lester, 61, 81 Warren, Charles, 81 Warren, Earl, 113 Washington Post, xiii Washington v. Legrant, 133

185

Washington, DC, vii Washington, George, 19, 140 Weber, Max, 7 Weehawken, New Jersey, 17 West Virginia, 131 What Social Classes Owe Each Other, 61 Whitaker, Alexander, 39 Whitfield, George, 19 Who Are We, 152 Why America Hates Welfare, 133 Willcox, Walter, 58–59 Williams, Roger, 37 Williamson, Peter, 40 Wilson, Pete, 135 Wilson, Woodrow, vii–viii, 64 Winslow, Edward, 38 Winthrop, John, 38 Worchester v. Georgia, 48 Worchester, Massachusetts, 33 WWI. See First World War WWII. See Second World War Yale University, 60 Zangwill, Israel, 80

About the Author

Kyle Farmbry is an assistant professor in the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University–Newark. There his research focuses in the areas of organizational theory, comparative public administration, and intersectoral relations.

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