INTRODUCTION
This article argues that Americans operate with a concept and practice of political autonomy centered on a notion of “mastery,” which is inextricably linked to race, gender, and class hierarchy. I take the concept of mastery from Max Weber's (Reference Weber, Lassman and Speirs1994b, Reference Weber, Lassman and Speirsc) essays on democratization in Germany, and use it to broaden the construct of a Herrenvolk democracy beyond its traditional association with segregation and slavery. Adopting King and Smith's (Reference King and Smith2005) conceptual framework of “racial orders,” I argue that developing the connection between race, mastery, and political autonomy illuminates the functioning of racist political orders in two crucial respects. First, although King and Smith argue that competing “White supremacist” and “transformative egalitarian” orders structure American political development over time, they are reticent about applying the term “White supremacist” to the current antiegalitarian racial order, preferring the term “antitransformative.” While this reticence is in some ways understandable, it is not analytically developed or explained. Is the current antiegalitarian racial order White supremacist in any identifiable way? If not, in what sense is it a racial political order at all? Relatedly, scholars of American public opinion have crossed swords over the nature, and indeed existence, of new forms of racism: symbolic, “free market,” or “laissez faire” (Bobo et al., Reference Bobo, Kluegel, Smith, Tuch and Martin1997; Brown et al., Reference Brown, Carnoy, Currie, Duster, Oppenheimer, Shultz and Wellman2003; Kinder and Sears, Reference Kinder and Sears1981). To the extent that such forms of racism exist, what is their relation to nonracist, though “antitransformative,” political values? Here I argue that a contemporary concept and practice of political autonomy, centered on the notion of mastery, exhibits strong parallels to notions of political autonomy, race, and moral worth developed by Southern Progressives in the context of building and defending segregation. Developing these parallels, I argue that this concept of political autonomy is both a central ideational component of the contemporary “antitransformative” order, and identifiably racist.
Still, it would be inaccurate to claim that all who identify with the coalition King and Smith call “antitransformative” are racist, let alone consciously or intentionally so. As King and Smith (Reference King and Smith2005) indicate, contemporary antitransformative politics adopts, with varying degrees of sincerity, the language of equality and rights. What facilitates coalitions of functional racists and nonracist, but antitransformative, supporters? Again I turn to the Southern Progressives, focusing on a case study of the development of segregation in Atlanta between 1880 and 1910. It is well established that Southern urban elites argued for segregation as a progressive and modern solution to the problem of race relations, and offered it as an enlightened alternative to more populist, violent, and exclusionary visions prevalent in the South at the time (Cell Reference Cell1982; Rabinowitz Reference Rabinowitz1978). I focus on Atlanta for two reasons. First, as Rabinowitz suggests, Atlanta had become, by 1890, “the archetype of the New South,” as a rapidly growing urban center with a reputation for racial moderation (Rabinowitz Reference Rabinowitz1978, p. 8). Second, it was the new cities of the East, including Atlanta, in which segregation “developed most aggressively and most thoroughly” (Cell Reference Cell1982, p. 134). Atlanta between 1880 and 1910 thus presents a crucial case study of the relation between “moderation” and racism in the emergence of the second White supremacist order.Footnote 3
In “racial orders” terminology, Southern Progressives played a crucial role in building a White supremacist racial order that was acceptable both to urban elites in the South, and to their Northern counterparts (Williamson Reference Williamson1984; Woodward Reference Woodward1974). Southern Progressives grafted together liberal and Southern racial paternalist traditions, transplanting the latter from its agricultural roots into more urban and industrial settings. The resulting hybrid of race and liberalism was essential to the maintenance of a broad national coalition in support of the emerging White supremacist order. Southern Progressives present a useful point of contrast to contemporary antitransformative ideologists. Far from hiding their racism behind surface appeals to liberal categories, Southern Progressives were at pains to demonstrate their White supremacist credentials. The connections between their liberalism and their racism are thus easier to identify. The crucial connective tissue, I contend, was a conception of mastery of self and others thoroughly imbued with presumptions of race, gender, and class hierarchy, and yet understood as a precondition to the correct performance of political autonomy. The current concept and practice of political autonomy, one might say, is more phenotypically liberal than its Southern Progressive counterpart, and in today's political environment this provides it with a coalitional advantage. Without suggesting any direct inheritance, I argue for a structurally similar supremacist genotype at the core of both.
The goals of this article are thus theoretical, rather than empirical. My aim is to advance our understanding of practices of domination within liberal democracies, and specifically within the context of American political development. I do not seek to demonstrate, once again, that American liberalism is implicated in the history of racial domination. Rather I develop a lens through which the connections between relations of domination and liberal categories come into clearer, and sharper, focus. Thus my argument relies on the centrality of political autonomy to many varieties of liberalism, and proposes that one way of conceiving autonomy is in terms of mastery of self and others. The historical aspect of this article is not intended merely to show that American liberalism has become intertwined with racist categories (as though that needed demonstration), but to demonstrate that the intertwining occurs through a specific racialization of the category of mastery. At the same time, I develop my concept of Herrenvolk democracy in dialogue with the “racial orders” framework in order to facilitate both cross-temporal comparisons between racial orders in different historical periods, and to provide the groundwork for future research into possible conceptual legacies of earlier racist orders on our own political categories (paralleling recent work on the institutional legacies of earlier racist orders (King and Smith, Reference King and Smith2005; Lieberman Reference Lieberman, Lowndes, Novkov and Warrren2008)).
I contend that the theoretical framework developed in this article is superior to alternative, less nuanced, accounts of racial democracy. It allows us to explore a range of nominally democratic but functionally hierarchical societies, identifying the ways in which mastery is performed and organized while elucidating its different political effects at different moments. Crucially, mastery can comfortably accommodate gender, class, and racial hierarchies, as well as systems that operate through the interaction of such hierarchies. Thus what I advance is a general, nonracialized, account of a Herrenvolk democracy which I then apply in order to identify how, in a given historical moment, a particular concept of mastery is racialized and to what effect. This account can be further applied to make sense of the way racial, class, and gender relations operate in American democracy more generally.
SUBJECTS INTO MASTERS
In 1917 Max Weber wrote a series of essays critically examining the possibility of establishing a democratic system of government in Germany in the aftermath of the First World War. Suffrage and Democracy in Germany was published as a brochure in 1917 (Weber Reference Weber, Lassman and Speirs1994b), while a series of essays first printed that year in the Frankfurter Zeitung formed the basis for Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order, published in brochure form the following year (Weber Reference Weber, Lassman and Speirs1994c).Footnote 4 The two brochures contain a deeply critical set of reflections on German political traditions, and are bleak in their assessment of the potential for democratic self-government in Germany. My purpose here, however, is to draw from these two essays Weber's account of the relation between mastery and democracy, highlighted by his use of the term Herrenvolk to refer to fully democratic republics.
Weber's use of this concept is not, therefore, explicitly racialized from the start. In that sense, my use of the concept of Herrenvolk democracy, like Weber's, departs from now standard usage. Is this merely idiosyncratic? Pierre van den Berghe (Reference van den Berghe1967) adopted the phrase as a description of South Africa under apartheid. As such Herrenvolk democracy has been taken to describe a racially exclusive democracy: formally inclusive and democratic for the privileged “master” race, but hierarchical and oppressive for one or more subordinate races (Fredrickson Reference Fredrickson1981; van den Berghe Reference van den Berghe1967). Applied to the southern United States, it highlights parallels between apartheid and the system of Jim Crow laws developed across the South at the turn of the twentieth century. As Kenneth Vickery has argued, the concept better matched the rhetoric of White Southern leaders than it did the economic and political realities of ordinary White Southerners, but it has a clear purchase on the purported aspirations of White supremacy in the South (Vickery Reference Vickery1974).Footnote 5 What advantage is there in attempting to redefine the term at this late date?
In truth, van den Berghe's terminology provides limited purchase on the development of White supremacist states in the South in the twentieth century, and even less purchase on contemporary American society. It does highlight the (surface) paradox of a White supremacist democracy, but adopts Herrenvolk largely in the sense that the Nazis gave it, and thus as an already racialized concept. Resolving the paradox, on this account, means abolishing the Herrenvolk and extending privileges and rights on an equal basis to all citizens. And yet, as a formal matter, the United States extended legal rights and privileges to all citizens over forty years ago. This is surely one reason King and Smith (Reference King and Smith2005) have some difficulty applying the term “White supremacist” to the current “antitransformative” order—essentially no one advocates a return to Jim Crow. The description of the United States as a Herrenvolk democracy, in van den Berghe's sense, is thus increasingly forced and the account of what privileges the “master race” retains increasingly nebulous. Put bluntly, it is hard to state precisely what we would abolish were we to abolish Whiteness (Olson Reference Olson2004; Roediger Reference Roediger1994).Footnote 6 Nevertheless, as Lawrence Bobo (Reference Bobo, Krysan and Lewis2004; Bobo et al., Reference Bobo, Kluegel, Smith, Tuch and Martin1997) has argued, the successful defeat of the Jim Crow order by the organized Black community and civil rights activists did not end racial stratification. It did not end, therefore, relative White privilege and the ideological need to justify and explain that privilege. Yet we lack a theoretical account capable of encompassing both new and traditional racisms, and articulating the quite different relation between racism and liberalism at different historical moments.Footnote 7 It is towards such a model that this article advances.Footnote 8
Weber then, like Tocqueville (Reference Tocqueville, Mansfield and Winthrop2000), identified two potential outcomes of the transition to democracy: “either the mass of citizens is left without freedom or rights in a bureaucratic, ‘authoritarian state’ which has only the appearance of parliamentary rule, and in which the citizens are ‘administered’ like a herd of cattle; or the citizens are integrated into the state by making them its co-rulers” (Weber Reference Weber, Lassman and Speirs1994b, p. 129).Footnote 9 Two years later, in his Profession and Vocation of Politics, Weber seemed to conclude that only charismatic political leaders can check the power of entrenched bureaucracies (Weber Reference Weber, Lassman and Speirs1994d). But with the notion of citizens as “co-rulers” Weber, at least briefly, entertains the idea that a nation of citizens might exemplify the characteristics of political leaders and hold its own against a bureaucratic state. Weber's name for this possibility was a “nation of masters”—a “Herrenvolk” (Weber Reference Weber, Lassman and Speirs1994b, p. 129; Weber Reference Weber, Lassman and Speirs1994c, p. 269).Footnote 10
Clearly Weber did not mean to invoke any notion of racial democracy with this formulation.Footnote 11 A Herrenvolk, rather, was a “politically mature people” capable of “controlling the administration of its affairs itself, and, through its elected representatives, sharing decisively in the selection of its political leaders” (Weber Reference Weber, Lassman and Speirs1918 [1994], p. 269). It was, Weber thought, imperative that Germany develop a nation of this sort: “only a nation of masters are called upon to thrust their hands into the spokes of the world's development,” Weber declaimed, clearly implying that Germany's military loss stemmed from its political immaturity (Weber Reference Weber, Lassman and Speirs1918 [1994], p. 269).
More pertinent to the argument here is Weber's treatment of how a “nation of masters” emerges. This theme is developed most fully in Suffrage and Democracy (Weber Reference Weber, Lassman and Speirs1917 [1994]). In that essay Weber premises the emergence of democratic conventions of collective self-governance on the prior existence of a tradition of aristocratic mastery. Nations begin as nations with masters: they become nations of masters through democratization of the preconditions of aristocratic self-mastery. Lassman and Speirs (Reference Lassman and Speirs1994) suggest, in a footnote to their edition of the essay, that “Weber's usage [of the term Herrenvolk] conceives of a nation in which each individual is master of his own life and responsible for his own fate” (p. 129). But this underplays Weber's critical assessment of the possibility of Germany's becoming a “nation of masters.” Germany, Weber insists, lacked a genuine aristocracy, and with it any aristocratic tradition (Weber Reference Weber, Lassman and Speirs1994b). What Weber has in mind is not an abstract or formal political autonomy, but rather the dissemination through the society of a (culturally) specific social practice of mastery of self and others. Lacking any such tradition hampers the development of citizens as “co-rulers” in Germany.
There is an internal connection to The Profession and Vocation of Politics here in the criteria for effective political rule delineated by Weber. Political rule requires a distance that can only be achieved by someone who can live for politics and need not live from it. In Vocation this requirement is cashed out, principally, in economic terms: either one has an independent source of income sufficient to live on and can draw that income without having to devote one's energies to its production; or one depends on income derived from political activity itself (Weber Reference Weber, Lassman and Speirs1994d). Only the former case produces the genuine political leader. Similar terms are deployed in Suffrage and Democracy (Weber Reference Weber, Lassman and Speirs1994b). There, however, these conditions define not political leadership, but a “true aristocracy” (p. 108):
For what does ‘aristocracy’ mean, or rather, what conditions must obtain if a social stratum, whether it be essentially feudal (‘nobility’) or bourgeois (‘patricians’), is to function as an aristocracy in the political sense of the word and be put to political use? The chief requirement is a life untouched by economic storms. The most elementary precondition of all is that an aristocrat should be able to live for the state and should not have to live from it
(Weber Reference Weber, Lassman and Speirs1994b, p. 109).The parallels to Vocation are obvious. But in Suffrage and Democracy these terms project a possible alternative to charismatic leadership: the conventions and traditions of a genuine aristocratic class might influence a whole society, educating citizens to the conduct appropriate to a “nation of masters.”
Here Weber emphasizes not economic independence, but the “conventions and gestures,” the social practices, through which one learns to act as a citizen (Weber Reference Weber, Lassman and Speirs1994b, p. 120). “There is no doubt,” according to Weber, “that a true aristocracy can stamp an entire nation with its own ideal of distinguished conduct, for the plebian strata imitate the ‘gesture’ of the aristocracy” (Weber Reference Weber, Lassman and Speirs1994b, p. 108). Aristocracies in the Latin and English-speaking countries had played this crucial educative role, and the gestures and traditions of the “cavalier” and “gentleman” had shaped their respective societies. The conventions of the aristocrats, whether “imitated,” or “stripped of their exclusiveness and propagated throughout the nation,” are adopted by the “plebian” classes as their own. Crucially, Weber thought, “in all these cases the decisive features of those conventions and gestures could be imitated readily by all, and were therefore capable of being democratised” (Weber Reference Weber, Lassman and Speirs1994b, p. 120). The conventions of English gentlemen were, in principle, universalizable and as such could form the basis of a national way of life.Footnote 12
That Germany lacked a true aristocracy posed a problem for Weber. It meant that conservatives could hold out no alternative to democracy, it was true, but it also meant that Germany lacked a mature political tradition that might carry over to, and shape, a new democratic republic down to its individual members. Weber is scathing in his dismissal of the only comparable German traditions: the conventions of the officer corps and of the university fraternities. The conventions of the officer corps are simply not transferable outside that context. Those of the “man with a degree,” meanwhile, are a positive liability:
[T]he habits inculcated by the colour corps [i.e. the fraternities], were and are … patently not suitable for imitation by any circles outside those taking university examinations and certainly not by the broad mass of the public. They were therefore not capable of being ‘democratised’ despite the fact, or rather precisely because, they were in their essence profoundly plebian and not the manners of the man of the world or aristocrat
(Weber Reference Weber, Lassman and Speirs1994b, p. 120).The problem is twofold. The conventions of these clubs are designed not simply to be a code of good conduct, but to create and preserve spurious differences between those with university degrees and those without. They “formally represent caste conventions because they are inherently not susceptible of democratisation” (Weber Reference Weber, Lassman and Speirs1994b, p. 121). On the other hand, “because they lack any kind of aesthetic dignity or distinction, their character is plebian rather than aristocratic. It is this inner contradiction which makes them such a political liability and an object of scorn” (p. 121). The “Skull and Bones” artifice of a Yale University, Weber seemed to be suggesting, was hardly the basis for producing mature political leaders, and certainly did not provide a useful model of good citizenship.
Thus what Germany lacked was the tradition of the “man of the world.” Weber (Reference Weber, Lassman and Speirs1994b) clearly thinks the content of the tradition will vary from nation to nation. But invariably, besides being “economically dispensable,” the “man of the world” has “distance” and “reserve” and is emotionally “cool” (pp. 110, 112, 122, 113). He is the product of a political tradition that emphasizes “political character” and “responsibility,” and he therefore has the bearing to be able to ride out moments of panic or passion on the part of monarch or masses (pp. 113, 110). Moderation, cultured tastes, breadth of vision, and an “inner availability” for politics round out the portrait (p. 111).Footnote 13 A nation of masters in the strong sense, then, is a nation in which the “gesture” of this “man of the world” has been adopted by each individual citizen, if not in his private conduct, at least in his political deliberations.
A nation of masters is a nation of citizens who have internalized the inner convictions of aristocrats. This account opens space for reconsidering the relation between mastery and democracy, and the role of race in mediating that relationship in the United States. Weber describes political autonomy as the democratization of a particular form of (self-) mastery. This highlights the historical development of democratic societies out of earlier aristocratic ones, but it does so while retaining mastery as a concept internal to the practice of autonomy. Weber presents democratization as a “social transformation” in which the “formal values of the English and Latin aristocracies” were “stripped of their exclusiveness and propagated throughout the nation” (Weber Reference Weber, Lassman and Speirs1994b, p. 120). As mentioned above, Weber can't quite make this work for Germany. But even in that case, Weber emphasizes the importance of inherited traditions of political rule in shaping the internal life and political possibilities of a particular country.
This allows us to consider the effects of inherited conventions of mastery without worrying about whether Weber thought there was, or had been, a “true aristocracy” in the United States (he didn't). The failed political traditions of the Junkers influenced German political development as decisively as the tradition of the English gentleman did that of England. In the case of the southern United States, however, there is the tradition of the Cavalier gentleman, the somewhat boorish, parvenu near-cousin of the English gentleman himself. In what follows I extend Weber's analysis by suggesting that the concept and practice of political autonomy in Progressive-era Atlanta was crucially shaped by the inheritance of the “gesture” of the Southern Cavalier, as transformed by Southern progressives.Footnote 14
Below, I consider the tradition of the Cavalier gentleman as an inherited tradition of mastery: one that premised independence, and thus full citizenship, on self-mastery and the mastery of household dependents. The bulk of the analysis, however, centers on the dissolution of this tradition in the context of turn-of-the-century Atlanta. Progressive-era Atlantans inherited the expectation and tradition of a certain style of mastery, but developed new methods for demonstrating that mastery. In doing so they constructed a racialized concept of moral and political autonomy and a set of legal, political, and social practices through which one demonstrated such autonomy. Those who could not effectively do so became the object of segregation laws. Like Weber's aristocrats (something he does not himself acknowledge), Progressive paternalists displayed their own self-mastery through their mastery of others. I return to the problem this poses for any nation of masters in the conclusion. Tracing the development of this concept and practice, in turn, allows us to see how Southern Progressives made White supremacy compatible with one narrow version of liberalism, solidifying the Progressive-era coalition behind the second White supremacist order.
A CRISIS OF MASTERY
The period from 1880 to 1910 was a period of enormous transformation throughout the South. A focus on Atlanta is particularly fruitful, since the pace of change and growth in Atlanta in these years was so startling, and exacerbated trends evident throughout the region (Ayers Reference Ayers1992; Doyle Reference Doyle1990; Woodward Reference Woodward1951). I conceive of the transformation as a crisis of mastery in the sense that it destroyed the economic and social basis of a mode of mastery that dated back well into the antebellum period. That mode had centered on the mythical figure of the Cavalier gentleman planter (Norton Reference Norton1986; Taylor Reference Taylor1961). As Daniel Singal (Reference Singal1982) describes it, “the certifying mark of the true southern gentleman was his complete self-control … the aristocratic planter was reined in by such extraordinary internal discipline that he did not need the conventional legal and institutional restrictions of society to save him from temptation” (p. 18). “Rigid standards of decorum” and a “complicated code of honor,” according to historian William Taylor's (Reference Taylor1961) description of the myth, allowed the southern gentleman to restrain his natural impulses. In addition, however, he:
was the principle civilizing agent in a society where everything tended toward anarchy and disorder … Only the Cavalier possessed the heroic force of character which was required to hold back the restless flood of savagery that threatened to overflow the country
(pp. 301–302).Mastery was sharply contrasted with, and took its meaning from, the perceived lack of control of members of the lower social classes—but it was also performed through taming those lower classes, or at least holding them at bay. Self-mastery was, therefore, performed through mastery of social and economic subordinates: lower class Whites, slaves, family members. Naturally the myth did not describe the reality of planter conduct, any more than it adequately described the social tensions of antebellum society. But it did capture the outward forms of gentlemanly conduct, as understood by planters themselves, and to that extent shaped their conception of the preconditions of citizenship.
It is important not to conflate the two, but the conventions of Southern gentleman planters interacted with the emerging tradition of Jeffersonian independent husbandmen in the antebellum South. The ownership of slaves was not, per se, the precondition of mastery in this sense. Instead, as Stephanie McCurry (Reference McCurry1995) and others have shown, male heads of households more generally claimed the status of masters based on their control of household dependents. Masculinity, independence, citizenship, racial superiority: all were bound up with the ability to exercise household authority over dependents and at least enough land to feel self-sufficient (Bardaglio Reference Bardaglio1995; Bederman Reference Bederman1995; Edwards Reference Edwards and Bercaw2000; Fox-Genovese Reference Fox-Genovese1988; McCurry Reference McCurry1995; Oakes Reference Oakes1990). Though planters hardly noticed any intervening social category between themselves and their slaves, the conventions of control associated with the Cavalier gentleman shaped the meaning of independence for White farmers more generally. Of course the often sharp social and economic distance between planters and small farmers precluded any seamless transmission of traditions between the two. Gentleman planters dressed in aristocratic ideological garb to conceal the traces of their own over-hasty rise to economic and social prominence out of the ranks of the lower orders they affected to despise. Yeoman farmers, for their part, adapted the rhetoric of Thomas Paine to condemn the new would-be nobles and the Black dependent labor force that supported their extravagant lifestyles (Singal Reference Singal1982).Footnote 15 Nevertheless, the independence so prized by husbandmen was itself secured through control of subordinate labor. As such, the gesture, as it were, of the Cavalier, extended much more broadly than did the ownership of slaves.
Though the Civil War and emancipation destroyed the system of slavery, the Cavalier myth itself could be adapted to new conditions. As Singal demonstrates, this was precisely what ideologues of the New South did from the 1880s through the first decades of the twentieth century, adapting the myth of the Southern gentleman to a more urban and industrial South (Gaston Reference Gaston1970; Singal Reference Singal1982). Singal's description of the resulting “complex of ideas” is particularly pertinent here:
At its center was the venerable antebellum concept of the southern gentleman as the exemplar of self-control. But the gentleman's status had been somewhat democratized; while the Old South had tended to limit that rank to members of the planter class, in the New South middle-class citizens who demonstrated the prerequisite virtues (or appeared to demonstrate them) could now claim it
(Singal Reference Singal1982, p. 32).The emergence of a new urban White middle class made the extension of the code of gentleman planters more feasible than it had been in the antebellum period. But what were the prerequisite virtues, and how could they be demonstrated in an urban context? The gentleman had presided over a territory peopled with social inferiors. Even the “yeoman farmer” had held land and controlled the labor of household dependents, and could distinguish himself from slaves and poor Whites. If the status of Southern gentleman was to be even “somewhat democratized” what would be the vehicle of its propagation?Footnote 16 The development of legal segregation presents itself as an obvious candidate. A number of overlapping developments had put the system of mastery exemplified by the Cavalier gentleman into crisis at the end of the nineteenth century. Segregation, I show here, was directly responsive to that crisis.Footnote 17
Urbanization and Social Disorder
One obvious source of strain was the decline of agricultural prices throughout this period. Relatively high prices for cotton, after the Civil War, had enticed many White farmers into cotton production in the late 1860s and 1870s. At the same time, White farmers had been more and more thoroughly integrated into regional, national, and international systems of consumption and credit. As prices fell in the latter decades of the century, incomes declined along with the ability to repay loans. The net result was that many previously independent farmers lost title to their farms: the number of tenant farmers more than doubled in Georgia, for example, between 1880 and 1910 (Doyle Reference Doyle1990; Godschalk Reference Godschalk2005).Footnote 18 Black farmers, whose ability to attain the status of landowner had been sharply constrained to begin with, were hit harder still (Cohen Reference Cohen1991; Daniel Reference Daniel1972; Dittmer Reference Dittmer1977; Schmidt Reference Schmidt1982). In Georgia, the effect was a large-scale migration of young White and Black men and women to Atlanta in search of better opportunities. Atlanta's White population increased 175% between 1890 and 1910, while the Black population more than doubled between 1890 and 1920, as did that of the city as a whole (Godschalk Reference Godschalk2005).
Most of these migrants were young, and often single, and life in the city could be liberating, but it could also be disorienting, as much for onlookers as for the new migrants themselves. The influx of migrants, unused to city life, and the concurrent growth of new means of transportation, new places of entertainment, and new patterns of employment threw existing practices of control and subordination into crisis (Cell Reference Cell1982; Rabinowitz Reference Rabinowitz1978). A crucial example is the changed role of women (Gilmore Reference Gilmore1996). The sense of mastery of a male head of household had not depended solely on racial status, and certainly not on the actual exercise of control over slaves.Footnote 19 Rather, as David Godschalk (Reference Godschalk2005) argues:
The claims of white male Georgians to manhood and social status derived largely from their roles as protectors and guardians of their dependents, especially their wives and daughters … Any failure along these lines was a sign of weakness and dependency, a sign that a man was less of a man than his counterparts
(p. 22).Footnote 20The problem was that city life did not allow for the exercise of mastery in quite the way that male heads of households had come to expect. White women's labor force participation doubled in each decade between 1890 and 1910, so that by the latter year 18% of all White women were working outside the home. Not that working was new, but working under the direction and control of someone other than the male head of household was, and by 1900 coverture laws had largely disappeared, giving women greater control over their earnings (Godschalk Reference Godschalk2005; Hunter Reference Hunter1997; MacClean Reference MacClean, Dailey, Gilmore and Simon2000).
More troubling, at least for elite observers of city life, was the increase in young unaccompanied women in Atlanta's public spaces, as they traveled to and from work, and increasingly took advantage of the leisure activities on offer in the city. This “visible presence of unattached women,” Godschalk (Reference Godschalk2005) argues, “came to represent the broader threats to male authority and traditional morality triggered by the city's rapid modernization and growth” (p. 23). For individual women the large crowds and “relative anonymity” of the city could mean escape from the strictures of household life (MacClean Reference MacClean, Dailey, Gilmore and Simon2000, pp. 194–197; Welke Reference Welke2001). Many men transformed this social liberation into a fantasy of loose sexuality. The downtown area, and particularly Decatur Street, became the focus of such anxieties, and reports circulated of “fallen women” in “bordellos and cheap houses of assignation, where visibly drunken women walked the streets, and where unescorted daughters and wives might appear and disappear among large crowds” (Godschalk Reference Godschalk2005, p. 23).Footnote 21
Decatur Street was the focus of more than one set of anxieties, in fact. “Decatur Street,” writes Georgina Hickey (Reference Hickey2003), “is one of the few areas where races and ethnicities mixed freely” (p. 63).Footnote 22 Dotted with saloons and bars catering to working-class men and women of both races, as well as the occasional brothel, Decatur Street was home to dance halls, cheap theatres and movie houses, and other places of entertainment. On Saturday afternoons and evenings, the downtown came to life, as just-paid Black and White Atlantans:
descended on the downtown area to celebrate the close of their five-and-a-half day workweeks. They were joined by tourists and conventioneers lured to Atlanta's energy and excitement as well as nearby farmers, often derided as ‘hillbillies’ and ‘rednecks’ who were attracted to the city's good deals on retail merchandise and its insatiable demand for produce
(Godschalk Reference Godschalk2005, p. 27).A place of commerce, of danger, alcohol, and sex, Decatur Street was also a place of gender-, class-, and race-mixing. Until after 1906 saloons were not legally segregated, and many were functionally integrated, while women and men could be served in the same bars. Thus, Hickey (Reference Hickey2003) concludes, “urban growth shifted the rhythms of work and leisure, challenged the racial etiquette of the late nineteenth century, tipped the delicate class balance, and introduced controversial commercial amusements to the city” (p. 59).
But there were other sources of challenge. One was simply the success of the Black middle class in Atlanta in the same period (Gilmore Reference Gilmore1996; Littwack Reference Littwack1998).Footnote 23 Always small, the Black middle class nevertheless grew in stature and wealth, and was importantly able to emulate some of the trappings of White middle-class life. Black and White middle-class Atlantans lived in separate areas of the city, and increasingly shopped, dined, and were entertained in separate areas of the city as well. Similarly, the theatres the middle classes frequented were more likely to be carefully segregated (Dittmer Reference Dittmer1977; Goodson Reference Goodson2002; Hale Reference Hale1998; Littwack Reference Littwack1998). But if the social mixing on Decatur Street blurred the lines at one end of the socio-economic spectrum, the success of middle-class Black families did so at the other end. Some White elites scorned what they saw as attempts by Black middle-class families to imitate the cultural conventions of elite Whites. But the scorn belies a real anxiety: social statuses based on external displays of wealth can be emulated and are famously insecure (Herzog Reference Herzog1998; Welke Reference Welke2001). This insecurity was increased, of course, to the extent that Black southerners were actively challenging, or openly disregarding, prevailing racial norms. Stepping beyond Atlanta for a moment, Leon Littwack (Reference Littwack1998) finds a particularly telling comment from one Black South Carolinian, Sam Gadsden:
The white people began to begrudge these niggers their running around and doing just as they chose … That's all there is to segregation, that caused the whole thing. The white people couldn't master these niggers any more so they took up the task of intimidating them
(p. 230).Thus Black Atlantans, and Black southerners more generally, increasingly sought out the best accommodations, asserted their independence, and resisted, collectively and individually, attempts by Whites to enforce formal and informal segregation (Littwack Reference Littwack1998; Williamson Reference Williamson1984).
Modes of public transportation often crystallized these challenges. Single women going to work, or returning from a night out, Black and White middle-class men about their business, factory workers and domestic servants, along with their employers: all might mingle freely on the streetcars, as well as in the bars and saloons. Ray Stannard Baker (Reference Baker1964), a careful, if perhaps too sympathetic, observer of the growth of segregation laws, captures the point:
In their homes and in ordinary employment, they meet as master and servant; but in the street cars they touch as free citizens, each paying for the right to ride, the white not in a place of command, the Negro without an obligation of servitude. Street-car relationships are, therefore, symbolic of the new conditions. A few years ago the Negro came and went in the street cars in most cities and sat where he pleased, but gradually Jim Crow laws or local regulations were passed forcing him into certain seats at the back of the car
(p. 30).In other words, segregation laws were not simply coterminous with the practices of slavery. They were put into place to solve a problem: modernization and urbanization had thrown the old basis of mastery into crisis, and segregation established a new one (Steedman Reference Steedman2008; Welke Reference Welke2001).Footnote 24 In principle, and in the absence of any laws preventing this, anyone with the money could buy any seat on a street car. In principle, and in the absence of laws preventing this, anyone could buy a beer in any saloon, or pay a prostitute of any race or ethnicity. The point is not that markets undermine racism; they patently did not.Footnote 25 But they did put established conventions of mastery, established “etiquette,” into question (Hale Reference Hale1998, pp. 184–185). It isn't that Whites suddenly treated Blacks as equals, it's that they didn't know how to perform their presumed superiority.
If we see the entire period from 1776 (or 1800, or 1828) to 1965 as a roughly continuous White-supremacist democracy we miss this, and we consequently miss something important about the character of Jim Crow. Segregation laws were, most obviously and immediately, aimed at firmly securing racial domination (Hale Reference Hale1998).Footnote 26 But Baker's (Reference Baker1964) description pinpoints the actual exercise of autonomy, on streetcars and elsewhere, as a source of the crisis itself: “The Negro came and went in the streetcars in most cities and sat where he pleased” (p. 30). By paying his fare and taking his seat, a Black man performed the role of free citizen and not that of servant (Cell Reference Cell1982). Here White and Black “touch as free citizens,” and the very intimacy of that “touch” forms the crucial internal component of the crisis for the would-be master. Thus it is not incidental to the crisis, but forms part of its core, that White women are also increasingly exercising greater autonomy in their work, travel, and leisure time. White women and Black men also “touch as free citizens” in these spaces, and again the intimacy of that “touch” generates fears that implicate the desire of White women as much as the libido of Black men. Seen in this way, streetcars and saloons are equivalent social spaces: places were genders, classes, and races mix, and where equality implies intimate social contact and evokes sexuality. As Edward Ayers (Reference Ayers1992) emphasizes, “in the late nineteenth century, sexual relations did not have to end in intercourse or even physical contact to be considered intimate and dangerous to a woman's reputation and self-respect. In fact, the history of segregation shows a clear connection to gender: the more closely linked to sexuality, the more likely was a place to be segregated” (p. 140).Footnote 27 So, theatres, hotels, and restaurants were segregated, but not the kitchens of White homes, where only White and Black women would be present.
The threats to mastery posed by newly autonomous Black and female Atlantans were thus deeply intertwined—the familiar rhetoric of racialized sexuality is itself an indication of this. Autonomous action, on the part of Black Atlantans and women, was implicitly disruptive of norms of social intimacy, as well as racial etiquette. Indeed that very exercise of autonomy, on streetcars and among the cheap entertainments of Decatur Street, was taken as evidence of lack of restraint on the part of the lower orders. The equivalence of citizens as paying customers threw the purportedly restrained and unrestrained together indiscriminately. White elites were thereby robbed of the ability to demonstrate their own status as masters, as Sam Gadsden so clearly saw (Littwack Reference Littwack1998). At the same time, however, White elite men, especially young men, also frequented Decatur Street and rode streetcars. They too were touched as free citizens, and went looking for the thrill of that proximity (Ayers Reference Ayers1992). Self-mastery and mastery of others were thus simultaneously put into question by the changes sweeping the city.
Segregation, then, did more than solidify racial hierarchy. It broke up spaces for incipient White and Black working-class alliances, in bars and saloons along Decatur Street, allowed a reassertion of male dominance over wives and daughters, and facilitated elite attempts to restrain and control the intemperate (lower-class) White mob in the wake of the 1906 Atlanta race riot. What binds these strands together is the concerted effort on the part of White elites in Atlanta to use segregation (along with Prohibition and disfranchisement) to reconstruct an order of mastery they perceived to be in crisis. Jim Crow reestablished the mastery of White elite men over women, working-class Whites, and Black Atlantans of all classes by shifting the grounds of mastery to the terrain of self-restraint.
The account so far may appear somewhat abstracted from what W. E. B. Du Bois (Reference Du Bois1995) called the “three-cornered battle” for political and economic power among planters, African Americans, and White farmers following emancipation (p. 673). My aim, however, is not to distract from this essential point. I do insist that ideas are both material and themselves an irreducibly social product (they do not merely exist “in the heads” of individuals); and that they have a real (and occasionally decisive) influence within and over the character of any particular political struggle. They are at once a site of political struggle and a means by which it is waged and sometimes won. I focus on social status and meaning in this article not to displace other aspects of the political struggle, but rather to highlight how Southern Progressives (among others) fashioned a set of legal, social, and political practices institutionalizing White supremacy along with an account of those practices that made them palatable to a broad spectrum of White opinion in both the North and the South: more than palatable, indeed, positively liberal and progressive. This is a crucial achievement of Southern Progressives in this period, and underwrites the sheer breadth of the second White-supremacist order. And there are two sides to the achievement: crafting a rival account of White supremacy to that advanced by their radical opponents, and combining that account with a racially liberal political ideology.
Segregation and Social Order
Cast in these terms, reestablishing the order of mastery was advanced by Southern Progressives as no more, and no less, than a restoration of the moral order of slavery. Jack Kirby (Reference Kirby1972) emphasizes this aspect of White supremacist thought in the Progressive period. “The real basis of the ideology of white supremacy,” he argues, “was moral: blacks were innately inferior morally. This meant, simply, that non-whites lacked a superego, a set of built in restraints, guilt, or other curbs on the libido” (p. 5).Footnote 28 John Spencer Bassett (Reference Bassett1904), editor of the South Atlantic Quarterly, traced the relevant “acquired race traits” of Black Americans back to Africa. The African climate, he suggested:
develops an indisposition to ordinary muscular activity and with it a contentment with the things which are immediately to hand. Thus follows lack of enterprise, lack of invention, lack of reflection, and lack of sublimity. On the other hand, the mind runs into the animal emotions, expressing itself in impetuous fear, joy, or sorrow. The people are garrulous, improvident, and idle. They do not resist nature
(pp. 100–101).This, Bassett insisted, described the starting point, not the current condition, of Black Americans, but the description dovetailed with the view, prominent among Southern White supremacists, that only the discipline of slavery had provided African Americans the restraint lacking in nature. The boilerplate narrative then purported a “retrogression” on the part of freed people in the decades following emancipation: released from the necessary restraints imposed by masters, Black Southerners, it was held, had deteriorated into a life of crime and moral dissipation. Southern Progressives proposed a system of “tutelage” that would substitute for the restraint of slave masters. Under the guidance of a paternalist state, Black Southerners might, over a sufficiently long time span, be brought to the level of civilization Whites were thought already to have achieved.
This retroactive understanding of slavery, as constituting a moral order, crucially informed Southern Progressive self-understanding. Like the Cavaliers they mythologized, Southern Progressive elites, emblems of self-restraint, would “hold back the restless flood of savagery” that threatened on all sides (Gaston Reference Gaston1970; Taylor Reference Taylor1961, p. 302). Positioning themselves as “guardians” of a restored moral order was thus as crucial to their own sense of worth—to their own sense of mastery—as was the imposition of that order on others.
The elite response to the race riot in Atlanta in late 1906 illustrates some of these dynamics. Dozens of African American Atlantans were killed and many more wounded by White mobs that roamed the city over three days in September that year. The riot had begun, predictably enough, on Decatur Street, and involved attacks by groups of angry White men on Black men and women riding streetcars into the district. The riot was incited by newspaper stories of Black men raping White women, but city elites, in the aftermath of the event, mounted a much broader attack on the disorder they saw underlying the riot itself (Bauerlein Reference Bauerlein2001; Williamson Reference Williamson1984). Within days the Chamber of Commerce had met and forwarded proposals to the city council, and groups of middle-class Black men had been called to task for failing to control “their people.” Shortly thereafter a Committee of Safety, composed of leading White businessmen and corporate lawyers, was constituted to foster cooperation between leaders of both communities and ease racial tensions. By October 1, the city council was busy segregating saloons.
White elites did not see themselves as unsympathetic to the plight of Black Atlantans during and after the riot, nor did they simply identify Black criminality as the sole cause (though they were deeply hostile to the suggestion that Whites were themselves largely to blame). One prominent strand of analysis laid blame for the riot (and indeed many of Atlanta's problems) on the mixing of race, sex, and alcohol on Decatur street: “negro dives” that fueled lustful desires with alcohol and pictures of “nude” White women; unattached White women who inflamed those desires further; and the toxic proximity of White and Black working-class men in libido- and alcohol-soaked saloons. Segregating bars and saloons was accompanied, therefore, by efforts to make White working-class access to alcohol more difficult, and was followed by greater efforts to police the movements of White women (Godschalk Reference Godschalk2005; Hickey Reference Hickey2003). Again, my suggestion is that we see these apparently parallel efforts as deeply connected strands of a single project, one that translated the paternalism of the Cavalier into the context of urban life in the twentieth-century South.
Between October 1 and October 15, 1906, the city council passed a series of resolutions responsive to the idea that disorder emanated largely from Decatur Street and similar locations.Footnote 29 They mandated segregation for all saloons and bars operating in the city, set a price floor for alcoholic drinks, and banned chairs and seats in an effort to discourage any remaining patrons from overstaying their welcome. In December the city council returned to the issue, raising the price of whiskey licenses from $1000 to $2000, and that of beer-saloon licenses from $100 to $400. The net effect was to eliminate integrated bars altogether, and only twenty saloons still catered to Black Atlantans at all. At the same time, of course, higher license fees and price floors made the business of selling alcohol much less profitable, and the council surely intended to limit access to alcohol among the working class of both races (Godschalk Reference Godschalk2005). City elites presumed that alcohol fueled the violence of the White mob quite as much as the libido of Black men.
Indeed, while many insisted Black criminality had caused the riot, some White elites saw in the actions of the White mob itself a standing challenge to their own authority, and even to the very idea of White supremacy itself. Charles T. Hopkins, a successful corporate lawyer and member of the Committee of Safety, saw the White rioters as “hoodlums, understrappers and white criminals” (Godschalk Reference Godschalk2005, p. 139). In a speech, he emphasized how the riot had undermined White claims to superiority:
The Negro race is a child race. We are a strong race, their guardians. We have boasted of our superiority and we have sunk to this level—we have shed the blood of our helpless wards. Christianity and humanity demand that we treat the Negro fairly … it is our Christian duty to protect him
(Fredrickson Reference Fredrickson1971, p. 287).Hopkins's view of fairness was not incompatible with White supremacy. Nevertheless, Hopkins presented the Southern Progressive view of the proper relation between the races, made clear that the moral standing of Whites was at stake in maintaining that proper relation, and concluded that White “criminals” had, by their actions, brought that standing into question. Atlantan White elites could, indeed, be quite blunt in rejecting the premise of van den Berghe's Herrenvolk democracy:
There is a fatuous idea that the reliance of Anglo-Saxon civilization is in the color of its skin. Is that not a terrible mistake? De-civilization can go on under a white skin. The brutish and the ineffectual are not all black
(White Reference White1907, p. 185).Thus wrote the Reverend John E. White, of the Second Baptist Church in Atlanta, some months after the riot. Also active in attempts to foster cross-racial elite cooperation in the wake of the riot, White called for “Caucasian masterhood” and “the development of a masterful esprit de corps in the Southern States,” and he was a firm White supremacist (pp. 182–183). But developing this esprit de corps would “issue an influence of restraint upon the lawlessness of irresponsible white people and tend to draw them to the better levels of public opinion” (White Reference White1907, p. 188). Thus Southern leaders might prevent further “outbreaks” through a firm reimposition of their own mastery on both Blacks and Whites of the lower orders. Promoting “white supremacy along really unchallengeable lines” meant, in part, getting a grip on Whites whose supremacy was none too evident (p. 186).
Policing of White women was more fitful and less immediate. In the years before the riot, White elites worried that otherwise innocent young women would be “lured,” by way of cheap theatre amusements, into drinking and prostitution (Hickey Reference Hickey2003, p. 69). They also believed that the presence of unaccompanied White women inflamed the natural libido of Black men. Women were not banned from saloons until 1910, however, and even then bars and saloons often had “women's bars,” separate annexes in which women could be served (Hickey Reference Hickey2003, p. 66). Presumably the near exclusion of Black men was thought to solve the immediate problem. At the same time, the image of women as passive victims of male lust shifted, with a 1912 city council commission on vice, for example, suggesting that women's presence on the streets was the “cause of men's moral downfall” (Hickey Reference Hickey2003, p. 75). The city needed to be protected from women, as much as women needed protecting from men. The Atlanta chief of police took up the charge with a little too much enthusiasm, proposing a “squad of plainclothes detectives to patrol the streets and the city's cheap amusements.” Women would be “tailed by relentless ‘shadows’ of the detective force. They [would] be watched at every moment” (Hickey Reference Hickey2003, p. 74). The plan was shelved, but indicates the continued anxieties around gender roles in the city, as well as the deep connection between reform efforts and attempts to enforce moral restraint.
At the same time, the scheme underlines the central dynamic at work: the exercise of autonomy by women, in how and where they spend their leisure time, generates concerns about loosened moral restraints and disordered desire; in turn, the Progressive impulse is to martial the power of the state to the task of restoring order. A presumed inability to govern one's own impulses imposes a duty on the state to govern them for the individual.
Inevitably, this discourse of self-restraint undermined claims on the part of Black Southerners for political rights. Governance of the self was linked to capacities for self-government. John Carlisle Kilgo (Reference Kilgo1903), president of Trinity College in Durham, for example, thought the matter straightforward. “If anything is clear,” he wrote, “it is that the right to govern rests upon the capacity to govern, and those who are fittest to rule should rule” (p. 382). Black Southerners were not prepared for this task, thought Kilgo, and, paralleling Charles Hopkins in Atlanta, believed this presented White elites with a duty:
In its performance of its duty to the negro the state must act with a sympathy becoming the negro's lack of equipment for discharging the highest tasks of a citizen and must show a concern for his preparation to perform them
(Kilgo Reference Kilgo1903, p. 382).Again that “tutelage” relationship of White guardians and Black wards is central. The incapacity for self-governance necessitates tutelage by the state, and simultaneously legitimates disfranchisement. Edgar Gardner Murphy (Reference Murphy1909) summed up the position in the following way:
It is obviously true—as has been stated—that a democracy cannot consent to the establishment of a dependent class. And yet it is equally obvious that within a number of our Southern States that is precisely what the negro is. He is so not primarily as the result of political proscription, but simply because he is so. A race which, while numbering from 30 to 50 per cent of the population, contributes but 4 or 5 per cent of the direct taxes of the state, is as yet in an economic status which does not square with those industrial assumptions which are as important as the political assumptions of a genuinely democratic order
(pp. 189–190).Moral deficiencies prescribed economic dependence; economic dependence proscribed political rights and participation. For Southern Progressives like Murphy, as well as White elites in Atlanta, not only were disfranchisement and segregation compatible with a “genuinely democratic order,” they were essential to it.
THE “GESTURE” OF THE SOUTHERN PROGRESSIVE
Thus far I have described a general sense in which an old form of mastery, centered on Cavalier paternalism, was put into crisis by the development of modern, industrial, city life. I have pointed towards segregation and other “reforms” of the period, as potential solutions to this crisis (from the point of view of those who counted themselves masters). Here I use Prohibition to illustrate the terms of the new form of mastery, the Progressive paternalism, that I claim replaced that earlier form. As Dewey Grantham (Reference Grantham1983) notes, Prohibition was more “intimately associated with progressivism in the southern states” than perhaps in any other region (p. 175). As such it formed a part of the broad movement for moral, social, and political reform represented by Progressivism more generally. Prohibition was, Grantham insists, “more than an attempt at social control. It was, in some measure, the manifestation of a desire for social uplift of the poor and of a zeal to promote social justice” (p. 173). But we can see from the example of the Reverend John E. White's project of “Caucasian masterhood” that the desire for uplift was not inconsistent with the attempt at social control. As Grantham himself notes, “Prohibition campaigns were also an expression of concern about personal immorality and an instrument of social control with far-reaching class and racial implications” (p. 173). Reading Progressive reform in terms of mastery explains how these apparently disparate aims might be reconciled.
The crucial point is to see mastery not simply in terms of control, but also in terms of the propagation of one's moral code. We should view Prohibition as one part of an attempt by Progressives to inculcate the gesture of the Southern paternalist in all Whites, if not, in some more limited and aspirational sense, in the nation as a whole. In this sense the discourse of restraint plays a double function, at once marking the difference between masters and subordinates, while also authorizing the exercise of mastery itself. Finally, the exercise of mastery is the performance of mastery: it is through the exercise of mastery that one demonstrates one's own (self-) mastery to oneself and others.Footnote 30 Again the examples of John E. White and Charles T. Hopkins illustrate the point. For both men, control of lower-class Whites formed an essential part of demonstrating their own superiority. The riot embarrassed their Cavalier pretensions, and reasserting Caucasian masterhood restored their own sense of mastery.
The campaign for Prohibition in Atlanta crystallizes these issues in part because of its prominent role both in the election that preceded the 1906 race riot, and in the aftermath of the riot itself. The 1906 gubernatorial election was particularly heated. Hoke Smith, the “reform” candidate, proposed (at the urging of ex-Populist Tom Watson) complete disfranchisement of Black voters in the state. The competition with his opponent Clark Howell, fought out in the pages of the newspapers they both edited, thus deteriorated into a fight over who was the most thoroughly racist. Hoke Smith won that battle, along with the primary election in August, and the reform movement swept to power (Bauerlein Reference Bauerlein2001).Footnote 31 But the election had stirred ugly passions. Along with jousting among White supremacists, the newspapers had run a series of increasingly hysterical stories of rapes of White women by Black men.Footnote 32 Along with intensely vivid descriptions of the brutality of the perpetrator and the purity of the victim, the newspapers ran editorials indicting alcohol—and those who sold and consumed it—as the root cause of the problem. Hoke Smith, ever the opportunist, seized on the nexus of presumed sexual violence and alcohol to give an added urgency to the campaign to prohibit alcohol and shut down the saloons (Crowe Reference Crowe1968; Grantham Reference Grantham1983).Footnote 33 The riot that followed in September fed from these same passions and started in the heart of the downtown entertainment district.
Issues of uplift, social control, and White supremacy were thus deeply entangled in Southern Progressive thought and action. Their signature “reforms” (purification of the electorate, segregation, Prohibition, regulation of gambling, and so on) were, as Grantham (Reference Grantham1983) says, more than attempts at social control; and more than attempts at social justice they were attempts at social reeducation, using law as a means of “moral coercion”:
Prohibition, in a peculiarly satisfying way, absorbed the yearnings for reform and fulfillment in the early twentieth-century South. It offered a means of moral reaffirmation of traditional values, the promise of cleaner politics, and an avenue to employ the state in the search for moral and social progress
(p. 172).Not that I am suggesting that such yearnings were the sole preserve of elites. But where such yearnings seemed patently absent, the Progressive impulse was to inculcate them. Moral rectitude thus became the basis of moral superiority, but moral superiority was what Southern Progressive elites thought made them elite in the first place. It's what gave them license to morally coerce everyone else.
It is important to note that such sentiments found some expression among middle class Black leaders. As early as 1902, a Negro Young People's Christian Education Congress had met in Atlanta to “grapple with [the Negro's] problems” (Mixon Reference Mixon1997, p. 595). Gregory Mixon notes the decidedly moralizing tone set by the cumbersome panel session titles: “How Mothers Can Teach Their Daughters and Sons Social Purity,” “Child Marriage a Social Crime; Its Remedy,” “Public School Teacher to Moral and Social Elevation of the Race,” and so on (Mixon Reference Mixon1997). Elite Black Atlantans did, at times, express some degree of superiority to the “Decatur Street Negro.”Footnote 34 Nor did they doubt their own mission to elevate the lower orders of their own race. But in taking on this responsibility they were laying a claim not only to their own privilege, but to their equality with White elites. Thus the organizers of the 1902 Congress sought to “compel whites in Atlanta, the South, and the nation ‘to admit that there are two distinct classes of Negroes, and that this, the Christian educated class should be treated as others of their kind, without respect to race’” (Mixon Reference Mixon1997, p. 596). Those “of their kind” being White elite Atlantans.Footnote 35
This illustrates what I take to be the general logic of the strand of Southern Progressive politics that I am considering here. Many elite Black Atlantans sought full membership in Atlantan, and Southern, society as elites. It was through a demonstration of their own moral standing that they sought to gain social and political standing. Uplift of subordinate working-class African Americans was therefore not simply about uplift for its own sake, let alone for the sake of the Black working class. It was a claim to mastery, as powerful, if not as successful, as that of their White counterparts. It was undoubtedly often also meant as a challenge to the racial terms on which White supremacists claimed their own superiority, but it was not, on my account, a clear challenge to the idea of mastery as such. Indeed White supremacists were often unable to see that it was a challenge to their claims at all. Thus one White observer commended the “teachings” of the Negro Young People's Congress on the grounds that, if followed, they would strengthen White dominance: “a race of law abiding, self-respecting, industrious, happy and successful citizens would be evolved by the application of the superior forces of morality, thrift, judgment and perseverance” (Mixon Reference Mixon1997, p. 597). There was no tension between this outcome and the maintenance of White supremacy because there was no doubt about the ultimate moral superiority of the forces of White civilization. It was precisely through the project of social uplift that that superiority was demonstrated.
The ever-present possibility of “decivilization” under a White skin presented a sharper threat, and ironically the need to maintain White supremacy made the situation worse. If the basis of mastery had been built on class and gender hierarchies alone, wealthy elites of differing skin color could perhaps have bemoaned together (while sipping mint juleps and watching romantic operettas) the inveterate savagery of the lower orders without their own sense of mastery being called into question. The insistence on White supremacy blocked any such class solidarity, of course. But it also meant that the mastery of the elites of both races was called into question by the moral waywardness of their lower-class counterparts. Thus the Reverend John E. White (Reference White1907) saw that the project of “Caucasian masterhood” meant taming the “lawlessness of irresponsible white people” (p. 188), and the organizers of the Negro Young People's Congress saw that their own social advancement depended on the elevation (or at least social conformity) of working-class Black Atlantans. The performance of mastery depended, in other words, not only on the successful development of methods of social control, but on the propagation of the gesture of the morally superior Southern Progressive.
MASTERY AND DEMOCRACY
Charles Mills (Pateman and Mills, Reference Pateman and Mills2008) describes Rawls' distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory in the following terms:
The distinction is … that ideal theory aims at mapping a perfectly just society, while non-ideal theory seeks to adjudicate what corrective or rectificatory justice would require in societies that are unjust
(p. 94).In this sense, my own argument is more a prolegomenon to a non-ideal theory, rather than an example of non-ideal theory itself. My aim has been to map the concept and practice of autonomy (in its ordinary and political form) operative in a distinctly unjust society. That concept and practice, I have argued, was importantly shaped by Southern Progressives who sought to extend the “conventions and gestures” of the southern gentleman into an urban and industrial society.Footnote 36 The result was a Herrenvolk democracy in more than just racial terms. It was a society in which mastery, more generally, was a key attribute of elite status, and a precondition of full citizenship. Weber's concept of mastery was useful both in identifying mastery of self and others as crucial to the performance of autonomy, and in highlighting the historical development of such practices out of an even more exclusive, aristocratic, tradition. With this account in place, we can see that the problem of a Herrenvolk democracy is not merely that some are excluded from the exercise of certain privileges of full citizenship (as the Whiteness literature argues, for example). The problem lies deeper: in a Herrenvolk democracy, I am suggesting, inclusion operates through the successful performance of mastery. The result is a modern, and urban, society at once recognizably liberal in its basic economic and political structure and deeply hierarchical (along class, gender, and racial lines) in its essential social structure. Highlighting the interaction between these structures, I want to emphasize that it is not simply that, for example, being Black excludes one from full citizenship, but that the meanings associated with Blackness (lack of moral restraint, for example) both ground that exclusion and decisively shape the internal meaning of full citizenship status itself. To count as capable of political autonomy meant, in the Progressive-era Herrenvolk democracy, to exercise a certain kind of moral restraint understood as elite, White, male, and so on. This opens up a gap between the ideal content, or theoretical conditions, of political autonomy and its operative meaning within a particular liberal democracy (without, however, denying that the ideal content can be specified in ways that do not intrinsically entail domination).
The analysis suggests that practices of autonomy in liberal societies are shot through with internal tensions (again, not simply that liberal societies are so, but specifically that practices of autonomy are the location for these internal tensions). On the one hand, modernization increases mobility, and thus opportunities for the exercise of autonomy in an ordinary sense, even for members of low status groups. At the same time, exercising autonomy in this way does not guarantee that the larger society will treat you as a fully autonomous individual. At times, indeed, quite the opposite. Autonomy, then, is at least partly about being recognized as capable of responsible agency. Mika Lavaque-Manty (Reference Lavaque-Manty2006b) derives from Kant a useful way of thinking about practices in which autonomy is “at least partly ascriptive”:
I am autonomous if someone ascribes self-authorization to me. My actual cognitive ability to think may be a necessary condition for such an ascription, but it isn't a sufficient one. There is a complex interrelation between acquiring the capacity for responsible agency and coming to be recognized (in one's closer and wider social environment) as capable of being responsible
(p. 369).Self-authorization, of course, is not the same as self-mastery.Footnote 37 The argument here is that, for Southern Progressives, the ascription of self-authorization depended on the performance of mastery of self and others. Put differently, to be recognized as autonomous, and thus capable of responsible agency, in the turn-of-the-century South, required conformity to an elite moral code of behavior. Being recognized as capable of autonomy, in turn, was a precondition of full citizenship in the immediate sense that the denial of voting rights was in part justified by casting Black Southerners as wards of the (presumptively White) state.
Is this of merely historical interest, or does it illuminate the contemporary antitransformative racial order in the United States? Certainly, if autonomy is, at least partly, ascribed (a social status, granted or withheld within a specific social environment, that escapes the agency of those ascribed), then the conditions under which such ascription takes place, as well as the grounds for challenging those conditions, must be brought within the scope of our theorizing about autonomy in contemporary liberal democracies.Footnote 38 This is especially the case where the failure to be recognized as fully autonomous in some fashion limits one's claim to full citizenship. To the extent that American society operates with a concept of political autonomy substantially similar to that of Southern Progressives, and thus inextricably linked to race, gender, and class hierarchy, the analysis developed here illuminates, and indicts, our own practices.
Studies of White American public opinion on issues related to welfare, poverty, and Social Security suggest the parallel may be quite strong. Over a decade ago, Donald Kinder and Lynn Sanders (Reference Kinder and Sanders1996) advanced an account of “racial resentment” in which “racism is the conjunction of prejudice and values” (pp. 292–293). This did not mean, they insisted, that the pig's ear of racism was being dressed up as the silk purse of American values, nor that those values were themselves necessarily racist. Instead a particular combination of racial anger and “indignation” with “secularized versions of the Protestant ethic” motivated the voter behavior they studied (p. 293). Many White Americans both identified African Americans with moral inferiority, with failing to live up to that old Protestant ethic, and resented them for being able to get away with it (Kinder and Sanders, Reference Kinder and Sanders1996).Footnote 39 A sophisticated literature on race and public opinion continues to confirm the link between negative racial attitudes and views about social welfare among White Americans (Gilens Reference Gilens1999; Howard Reference Howard2007; Schram et al., Reference Schram, Soss and Fording2003; Williams Reference Williams2003; Winter Reference Winter2008).Footnote 40 And just as supposed moral deficiencies authorized mechanisms of domination and social control for Southern Progressives, so too we impose levels of intrusion and control on the private conduct of welfare recipients that would appear to have no warrant in a liberal account of the autonomous citizen.
Southern Progressive thinking is thus not far removed from assumptions built into some contemporary welfare programs. Linda Gordon's (Reference Gordon1994) argument that the welfare state institutionalizes a “dual social citizenship” has been robustly challenged (Howard Reference Howard2007). Nevertheless, Christopher Howard's careful description of the variety and extent of programs constituting the American welfare state leaves intact the view that some social programs directed towards the poor (principally those aimed at nonworking adults) connect the politics of race and moral worth in surprisingly familiar ways. I use Gordon's language here to capture the distinction that continues to be drawn among citizens on the basis of desert. This distinction, she argues:
… relate[s] obliquely to the old deserving/undeserving distinction: Legally the distinction is made among applicants to the inferior programs (because no moral judgements are made at all among those receiving entitlement stipends) and only the ‘deserving’ collect, but in practice the stigma of the inferior programs spreads to all their recipients, and they are frequently all branded as undeserving, while the honor of the entitlement programs imbues all their recipients with honor. Yet another set of tracks distinguishes those ‘independent’ citizens whose benefits (such as tax deductions, home mortgage assistance, public facilities, good schools) come from outside the ‘welfare’ system and are therefore less visible from those ‘dependents’ who collect ‘welfare’
(Gordon Reference Gordon1994, p. 293).Footnote 41The performance of “independence” and “dependence” on the part of citizens thus remains bound up with a moralizing discourse of self-restraint, and continues to authorize mechanisms of moral coercion aimed at those who fail in that performance. We do not, it is true, generally restrict voting rights on these grounds (though denial of the franchise to felons might constitute a counter example). But the ability of autonomous citizens to exercise control over state bureaucracies, rather than be controlled by them, was central to Weber's understanding of political autonomy. Welfare recipients can hardly be said to exercise such control, and are, indeed, rather severely policed in their private lives precisely because they are thought incapable of responsible agency (Lein and Schexnayder, Reference Lein and Schexnayder2007; Mettler Reference Mettler2000). As Marchevsky and Theoharis (Reference Marchevsky and Theoharis2006) put it, in their study of Latina immigrants and welfare reform:
Once a woman ‘voluntarily’ goes on welfare, she is subject to a contradictory discourse of choice. A woman is told that she has given up her right to choice (forfeiting the hallmarks of U.S. citizenship such as privacy and due process) after ‘choosing’ to go on welfare. At the same time, she is told that she can regain her right to choice if she demonstrates that she is capable of making ‘better choices’ for herself and her children
(p. 179).The structure of assumptions strikingly parallels the Southern Progressive thought detailed above: certain choices preclude the ascription of autonomy, and on this basis an entire regime of coercive moral improvement is justified.Footnote 42 Of course it is not inevitable that this emphasis on self-mastery, and on inculcating self-mastery in others, be bound up with assumptions about race, class, and gender. But that it is so seems fairly clear from the emerging public-opinion literature as well as studies of how welfare is administered in practice. Equally clearly, this complex of ideas continues to shape the meaning of full citizenship in the United States (Shklar Reference Shklar1998).
CONCLUSION
These observations can only be suggestive. Still, they illustrate how practices of domination might survive and function within a liberal democratic society, sustaining an antitransformative racial order in the process. They do so not simply as the survival of mere prejudice or overt racism, nor even as a covert attachment to thoroughgoing White supremacy (as a political ideology). Rather practices of domination function through the ascription or denial of autonomy on grounds that are themselves racialized, gendered, and class-inflected. This is not merely cloaked racism, but a real fusion (in practice) of the operative content of the liberal category of autonomy with a racist (in this instance) social meaning.
What this offers is not another account of “symbolic” or “implicit” racism, but rather a description of the background conditions against which such racism works, and why we often don't recognize it as racism at all. Consider two alternatives. On the first, I have what I consider a race-neutral valuation that those who work hard deserve support when they fall on hard times (note that I am tracing logical connections here, not implying an empirical claim about how any actual Americans do think). Simultaneously I have a prejudice that Blacks do not work hard. I therefore fail to support government welfare programs when I understand them to be targeted at African Americans. This would seem a simple case of ill-informed bigotry (Gilens Reference Gilens1999).Footnote 43 But suppose as a second alternative that I do not consciously hold any separate prejudiced view of African Americans, and would sincerely deny being racist if challenged. Still, like most White Americans I tend to be unsympathetic to government programs targeted at African Americans, and respond to implicit (but not explicit) racist appeals (Mendelberg Reference Mendelberg2001). Dominant approaches to this problem presume either that I am disingenuous in denying my racism, or that I am at best ambivalent, harboring strong attachments to equality along with racial resentments (Kinder and Sanders, Reference Kinder and Sanders1996; Mendelberg Reference Mendelberg2001). In either case the analytic presumption is that there must be a tension between my racial predisposition and my attachment to the norm of equality, whether I am consciously aware of it, or suppressing it.Footnote 44 My argument, however, is that in practice there may be no external tension of this sort: if the conditions under which I ascribe autonomy, for example, are already racialized, Blackness and autonomy will present themselves to me as a performative contradiction. I will fail to recognize exercises of autonomy by Black welfare recipients as exercises of autonomy at all, and may even take them to be confirmation of a lack of capacity for autonomy. This clarifies why explicitly racist appeals don't work. Intuitively it is not clear why any White Americans who do harbor negative racial attitudes would continue to privilege the norm of equality over racial resentment. It seems to be a merely descriptive fact about American political culture as it stands now.Footnote 45 My argument is that in practice the norm of equality is itself racialized (and so the tension is internal to the norm itself). Implicit appeals tap into the operative racial content of the purportedly race-less categories. Explicitly racist appeals violate the categories of equality themselves, and in this way are perhaps obviously racist to (almost all) White Americans. Thus I can be utterly convinced of my own attachment to principles of equality, while signing up to an antitransformative racial order whose practical implications are to perpetuate racial inequality. I do not recognize the tension between my principles and my racial predisposition because in practice that isn't where the tension is located. One can expand the point further: in part I understand myself to be individually responsible just in so far as I am not a Black welfare recipient (for example), even if I happen to live on disability pay, or have purchased my house with a government-subsidized loan. Though I subscribe to a norm of equality, I take my own adherence to the conditions of that norm as a basis for claiming a moral superiority over those who fail to do so. This moral superiority, in turn, authorizes my endorsement of mechanisms designed to impose individual responsibility on others (Mendelberg Reference Mendelberg2001). A Herrenvolk democracy, then, will be one in which a particular practice of mastery is democratized, forming part of the implicit norms citizens take to be the conditions of moral worth and equal citizenship.
I have used Weber's concept of a “nation of masters” as a critical tool to illuminate how practices of mastery may become embedded within formally liberal democracies, and to explore how we might give greater flexibility and analytical power to the idea that such democracies constitute Herrenvolk democracies. Of course Weber's own use of this term did not carry negative connotations: for Weber the gesture of the aristocrat was contained in his independence and consequent ability to stand against the encroachment of bureaucratic power. I have read this concept against the grain of Weber's intentions, however, because the traditions he references, that of the cavalier and English gentleman, also involved practices of domination. To the extent that liberal democracies represent the “democratization” of aristocracy, they inevitably bear the imprint of both sides of that inheritance: claims against governmental power as well as claims to power and status over others. Weber's “nation of masters,” therefore, risks a nation composed of citizens who require the performance of mastery as the proof of their own self-mastery, or who at least need the distinction between those who do and those who do not exhibit proper self-mastery.Footnote 46 The feeling of moral superiority contained in the claim that I am, at least, not a “Decatur Street negro,” or a “welfare queen,” requires people who can be so described. Claims to full citizenship, and political autonomy, so grounded, are inevitably inegalitarian. Only an historically informed critique of the way race-, gender-, and class-based moral statuses become embedded within formally liberal and democratic institutions can point towards a more genuinely egalitarian politics.
