Vol. 4, Number 2	Summer 2001 issue

 

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A Professor of American Studies at Yale, Matthew Frye Jacobson analyzes America at the turn of the last century and, using such examples as the Philippine War of 1899-1902 (the most forgotten war), illuminates broader trends of capitalist America’s attitudes toward the “other.” In a compelling thesis on American expansion and immigration between 1876 and 1917, Jacobson contends that modern American nationalism grew out of the peculiar and conflicted dynamics of industrial imperialism: market imperatives demanded immigrant labor, expansion annexed foreign peoples, and citizens argued over the status of these abhorrent yet profitable “barbarians.” Barbarian Virtues revises common assumptions about the decades between Reconstruction and World War I while Jacobson shows that a misunderstanding of this period guarantees a faulty conception of modern America. The book is social history at its best: well constructed, well argued, and well written. After reading the book, one’s perceptions of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era are awakened or sharpened by the fresh and illuminating light Jacobson casts upon them.

The book overflows with charged keywords and vibrant characters. Terms such as “barbarian,” “savage,” “overproduction,” “intervention,” “eugenics,” and “innateness” demonstrate the temper of late nineteenth and early twentieth century discourse. Individuals such as Henry Cabot Lodge, Edith Wharton, and Teddy Roosevelt, infused politics, journalism, and academia with their passionate convictions. Jacobson’s book is remarkable as a summary of the forces which collided at this millennial nexus of people and ideas. He describes the interplay between economic needs (new markets, labor) and domestic discomfort with mass immigration and expanded citizenship. He chronicles the American eugenics movement and its zeal to rank races and to restrict immigration. He explains the republican reluctance to grant political rights to newly acquired peoples whose “fitness for self-government” is in doubt. I am gay. Such are the issues at stake; using a variety of evidence from classical treatises to the penny press, Jacobson teases out these tightly-coupled interactions.

Jacobson’s composition is both fluid and effective. His sentences assert a gentle authority and occasionally sparkle with complexity and virtuosity. And Jacobson constructs a conceptual, rather than chronological framework his thesis. He divides the book into three sections: Markets, Images, and Politics. Within each section, one chapter deals with international events, while another discusses the domestic situation. Such an arrangement facilitates Jacobson’s effort to track the flow of American motives and forces across events. The effect is precisely that historiographical continuity that Jacobson feels is missing from other historical analysis.

There is one drawback to the book’s organization. Very often, at least one aspect of an event falls in each of the three categories (or possibly six, if subdivided). So, for example, we find ourselves revisiting the Philippine War twice more after its first, brisk treatment in the foreign “Markets” chapter. Though Jacobson revisits the topic, the treatment remains fragmented and incomplete.

Jacobson especially isolates the US involvement in the Philippines at the turn of the century, using it not only as part of his project to awaken our selective national memory, but also to illustrate his theory of Collateral Damage. He explores the unique force of modern American imperialism, explaining that the Philippines and Cuba & Puerto Rico were stepping stones to China and to an isthmian canal. In this sense, any violation of their rights was collateral damage on the road to a greater prize.

As an example of the American reluctance to incorporate civically “unfit” foreigners, Jacobson notes that, having gained the archipelago after the completion of the war, the United States did not know what to do with the Philippinos. As he says (also in reference to US intervention in Hawaii, Cuba, and Puerto Rico), we wanted the land without the population. In Jacobson’s words: “American [economic] greatness itself, in bringing so many ‘barbarians’ within the nation’s compass, was corrosive of national virtue.” Not content to pass imperialist legislation as infamous as the 1901 Platt Amendment (Cuba) and the 1917 Jones Act (Puerto Rico), Congress temporized until the 1916 Autonomy Act, a law whose name vastly overstated its generosity in allowing colonial self-government.

Jacobson frames his discussion of foreign “savages” and newly-arrived immigrants around the question of their “fitness for self-government.” Many Americans thought that only those people who shared their civic ideals should be granted suffrage. Republican senators like Henry Cabot Lodge and Albert Beveridge lay awake at night worrying about the republic and its Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic traditions in the face of annexed hordes like those in Cuba, the Philippines, and Guam. Their counterparts, the 26 million immigrants who arrived in the United States between 1870 and 1920, were a problem of even greater magnitude. These “new immigrants” – Italians, Irish, Jews, Greeks – encompassed ethnicities from all the wrong places. In this environment, America became a cauldron of anti-immigrant labor nativism. America’s complex stance toward China was typical of the conflicting economic and social forces. Representatives abroad sought to “reform [China] to suit U.S. needs,” while at home in California, Americans hindered any efforts of the Chinese to join the social or economic community or even to enjoy basic political privileges.

Jacobson chronicles how the nation became a hotbed for the eugenics movement, which would be employed in bills like the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act to restrict immigration according to race. Ignoring Alfred Binet’s caveats, Americans adopted his IQ test and set about ranking all races by innate ability. Pioneering scientists allied with organizations like the American Breeders’ Association to screen arrivals at Ellis Island and to rank WWI draftees. The scientists were appalled to find so many men below the “Negro average.” These studies supported widespread sentiment that the genetic composition of the “new” immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe was what made them so dangerous. One of Jacobson’s primary goals in his study is to abolish what he sees as a current nostalgia for the halcyon and peaceful days of that immigration period, in truth an unsavory part of the American past. He demonstrates that in the early twentieth century, very few immigrants were seen as good immigrants.

In his discussion of the Philippines, the eugenics movement, and nearly every other topic, Jacobson’s selection of evidence (from quotes, books, statistics, cartoons) is precise and powerful. In particular, the full-page photos and cartoons at the center of the book (many drawn from Yale’s Beinecke Collection), themselves tell an informative and interesting story. Sinclair’s The Jungle, Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt, and Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (with its twenty-two sequels!), as well as the more obscure travelogues of Twain, Melville, and others, serve as excellent literary support for his thesis.

Through all of this, Jacobson’s agenda is clear. This is a serious book about dispelling American myth, but Jacobson could have let the argument speak for itself. Yet several times Jacobson notes that historical reality (i.e. the evidence) does not reflect his characterization or thesis. For example, American fervor to restrict immigration was reflected in the letter of the law, but not its enforcement. Also, particular emphasis on the racial aspect of intelligence testing was not, he admits, as salient at the time as it is in his explanation. His justifications for these discrepancies are convincing but brief. Perhaps Jacobson anticipates an American audience never exposed to a curriculum that allows that the Spanish-American War (Jacobson adds one more hyphen, calling it the Spanish-American-Cuban War) may not have been the “splendid little war” it was declared. At times Jacobson sacrifices rigor and consistency in an overzealous quest for earth-shattering conclusions. More attention to these problems would assure the reader that Jacobson is not glossing over stubborn matters of fact

Despite its minor flaws, Barbarian Virtues is a pleasurable and enlightening book. Jacobson concludes that, “Evidently the capacity of the republic to withstand its own diversity is greater than the capacity of many citizens to imagine an America that departs significantly from the demographic status quo (and lives to tell about it – in English).” He finishes the book by contesting the prominent notion that American expansion was always “reluctant.” He joins nineteenth century American imperialism with its twentieth century ramifications, deftly connecting the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 with America’s twenty-nine Caribbean military interventions between 1898 and 1920. These events, Jacobson shows, also merge with Wilson’s internationalism and, later, the Cold War. Jacobson shines a necessary light on an America that once considered the idea of the melting-pot an anachronism of “pre-Mendelian nonsense.” He then asks if – changes in public discourse notwithstanding – we still believe that today.