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Ralph Waldo Emerson's Saxons Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Saxons Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article/95/4/977/713359 by guest on 23 September 2021 Nell Irvin Painter Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) towers over the American Renaissance but does not, though he should, reign as philosopher-king of American white-race theory. Widely hailed for his enormous intellectual strength and prodigious output, Emerson wrote the earliest full-length statement of the ideology later termed “Anglo-Saxonist.” His “Saxons” are not, most emphatically, the same as white Americans or white people.1 We ordinarily locate both white masculine gender panic and spread-eagle Anglo-Sax- onism at the turn of the twentieth century, but Emerson laid them out half a century earlier, in the 1850s. In an influential treatise and oft-repeated lectures, he portrayed the American as Saxon and the Saxon as manly man and separated the genealogy of the Amer- ican Saxon from that of the Celt. Deftly and subtly, Emerson elevated the Saxons and disappeared the Celts from the identity of the American. Emerson makes it crystal clear that “Saxon” (or, later, “Anglo-Saxon”) is not a synonym for “white,” even though the his- toriographical literature often seems to equate them. My remarks this evening come from my work in progress, The History of White People, which W. W. Norton will publish in the spring of 2010. The book offers a counterhistory of a prominent theme in Western thought, historicizing the notion of the white, rather than the nonwhite, races.2 Let me state categorically that I do not underestimate or ignore the overwhelming im- portance of black race in United States history. A truly gigantic literature exists to explain the meaning and importance of race when it means black, to prove that race-as-blackness really and truly does exist (and, more recently, to show that it is no more than a cultural construction). By concentrating on the white races, I do not overlook or downplay the fundamental nature of concepts of black race. After all, the United States as a nation was founded by and largely for the owners of African slaves. Over the course of some two hun- dred years, federal, state, and local governments labored to define black race, a history we Nell Irvin Painter is the Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, at Princeton University and currently an undergraduate student in visual art at the Mason Gross School of the Arts of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. This article is a revised version of the presidential address delivered to the convention of the Organization of American Historians in New York, New York, on March 29, 2008. Readers may contact Painter at [email protected]. 1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. V: English Traits, ed. Robert E. Burk- holder, Douglas Emory Wilson, and Philip Nicoloff (Cambridge, Mass., 1994). Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Anglo- Saxonist lectures include “Permanent Traits of the English National Genius” (1835), “The Genius and National Character of the Anglo-Saxon Race” (1843), and “Traits and Genius of the Anglo-Saxon Race” and “The Anglo- American” (both 1852–1853). 2 Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People: Constructions of White Americans from Antiquity to the Present (New York, forthcoming). March 2009 The Journal of American History 977 978 The Journal of American History March 2009 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article/95/4/977/713359 by guest on 23 September 2021 Ralph Waldo Emerson. Engraved and published in 1878 by S. A. Schoff from an original drawing by Sam W. Rowse. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-07398. recognize all too well. We know also that concepts of black-race identity have changed over time, in terms of naming and of ostensible biological basis. So far this sophistication has only barely begun to extend across the color line.3 Statutory and biological definitions of white race remain notoriously vague—the leav- ings of what is not black. But that vagueness does not indicate disinterest. Quite the contrary. Another gigantic literature of race exists, much less known today, explaining the meaning, importance, and honest-to-God reality of the existence of white races— white, the now usually unraced race. We may be accustomed to alterations in the mean- ing of colored race; we hear the passage from “colored” to “Negro” to “black” to “Afri- 3 The vast literature on black race goes back to David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, ed. Peter P. Hinks (1835; University Park, 2000). For useful, though now dated, introductions to racial theory, see Kimberle Crenshaw et al., eds., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (New York, 1995); and Richard Delgado, ed., Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge (Philadelphia, 1995). The profession- alization of the field of black history began with Carter G. Woodson’s founding of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History) in 1915 and the founding of the Journal of Negro History (now the Journal of African American History) in 1916. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Saxons 979 can American” as changing discourse. But with the field of critical white studies nearly a century younger than black studies, we are much less able to comprehend the less salient but equally mutable discourse of whiteness. I further say white “races” in the plural be- cause for the better part of a century Americans believed more than one European race existed.4 During the hundred years of heavy working-class European immigration (c. 1830– 1924), experts and laypersons labored to racialize people who were already considered Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article/95/4/977/713359 by guest on 23 September 2021 white in phenotypical and purely legal terms. This history of the meanings of white race can be harder to see now, for the concept prevailing today—of one capacious white race— can obscure a complex past. We need to keep in mind that wide-scale acceptance of the idea of one big white race dates back only to the middle of the twentieth century, becom- ing hegemonic during the New Deal and World War II. In the 1930s and 1940s, southern determination to keep the Negroes down permeated federal law, prohibiting their access to public services, notably through New Deal policies affecting housing. The war against German National Socialists delegitimized racist ideologies, and after the war a rising black civil rights movement defeated legal segregation and disfranchisement. It also elevated the salience of black/white difference. The emphasis on black and white transformed white races into white ethnicities, obscuring the earlier history of plural whitenesses.5 Here I want to go backward, back before the New Deal and World War II consolidated Euro-Americans into one white race, back before the early twentieth-century immigra- tion of people from southern and eastern Europe inspired scholarly examination of the races of Europe, back to the time when impoverished, hardworking Irish immigrants were racialized as Celts. Back to the 1850s, when Ralph Waldo Emerson lent his golden pen to the ideology we know as Anglo-Saxonism. Although Emerson gave American Anglo-Saxonism its most eloquent presentation, he did not invent it. Thomas Jefferson, among other Americans and Britons, also believed in the Saxon myth, a story of American descent from Saxons by way of England. Jefferson’s fascination with the Saxons and Old English began during his student days at William and Mary College, and he carried a belief in Americans’ Saxon roots to his grave. I want very briefly to review Jefferson’s engagement with the Saxon myth, which in stressing poli- tics differs from Emerson’s infatuation with masculine brutality and beauty. Thomas Jefferson’s Saxons For Thomas Jefferson, Saxon descent explained political differences between the patriots of the newly formed United States of America and the ruling class of Great Britain. He 4 The literature of critical white studies reaches back to the mid-twentieth century, to Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (1949; New York, 1961). But the recognized founding texts of the field are David R. Roediger,The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991); and Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995). Other important books in the field include Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (London, 1994); Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York, 1998); George Lipsitz, The Possessive In- vestment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia, 1998); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); and Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (New York, 2003). Useful anthologies include Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York, 1996); and Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, eds., Critical White Studies: Looking behind the Mirror (Philadelphia, 1997). 5 On the emergence of white race in the New Deal era and World War II, see Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2001), 128–37; and Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), 251–89. 980 The Journal of American History March 2009 contrasted what he saw as the Saxon origins of positive English institutions to the Nor- man origin of the Tories.
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