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The One and the Many 153
Numerous other expressions of this type can be found sprinkled liberally
throughout the literature. Typical was the lesson that the editor of Harper’s
took away from a reading of The Autobiography of a Japa nese Boy. The book,
he contended, would “help to clear away the delusion that the quality, the
essence of human nature is varied by condition, or creed, or climate, or color;
and to teach the truth of our solidarity which we are so long a-learning.”
Commenting on the widespread use of race as an explanation of group differences,
the southern writer George W. Cable called it “pure twaddle.” “It may
be there is such a thing,” he granted, but was quick to add that “we do not
know. It is not proved.” For James Bryce, the much- admired British observer
of American ways, racism was the very opposite of knowledge. It was “the
contemptible resource of indolent prejudice . . . a confession of ignorance.”
There is also some question as to how widely this racist “knowledge” was
circulated— not very far, by some accounts. These universalist views would
eventually be enshrined in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica article on “civilization.”
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But it was easier to assert the unity of the pro cess than to explain its par tic -
u lar variations. What had made peoples so different? The “local peculiarities”
that one found everywhere were evident, but their causes were not. “How
deep do these provincialisms go?” asked one writer. “Are they born with the
children? Can not all men who choose, by per sis tent ly cutting off these habits
at the top, finally kill them at the root?” It was a confusing business. Thomas
Wentworth Higginson’s biographer suggests that, for his protagonist, “ ‘race’
was confused with religious, national, and ethnic groups.” James Parton, best
known for his biographies, suggested that class was the key, part of a broad
historical pattern of treating others as inferiors: “These antipathies, we repeat,
are all very much alike— Whig and Tory, Federalist and Demo crat, Brahman
and pariah, Spaniard and Moor, Mohammedan and Christian, Christian and
Jew, Protestant and Catholic, Church- man and Dissenter, noblesse and peasant,
Indian and squatter, white man and black man.” The Lamarckian paleontologist
Nathaniel Shaler, though he believed in polygenesis and the
inferiority of the Negro, attributed much race prejudice to simple in- group,
out- group dynamics. Some authors who thought they were making the case
for the centrality of “blood” wound up arguing something altogether different
when they emphasized the transforming potential of education or Christianity.
Moreover, intelligent people could take inconsistent lines of argument.