I’ve been amazed in reading James Bradley’s Imperial Cruise to discover how pervasive racial theories dominated political thought and action in America. Racism was not simply a hold-over from the slave holding south; it was taught in the elite colleges of the East Coast by men who were the top professors of their time. Elected leaders, as well as those in business and the military believed these theories as strongly as they believed that women couldn’t think, or vote.
The book is reviewed here but I’ve since found an interview with Bradly on the History News Network that I wanted to put up separately.
I didn’t seek out the two term papers that President Roosevelt happened to write on race and highlight them in this book. I point out that the explanation given to the American public was based in racial theories that they were taught at Harvard and Columbia…
Could you talk more about what those theories actually were…
The theory was that civilization followed the sun and [it developed] in the Caucasus mountains, that’s why whites are caucasians. A white person is called a caucasian because scientists theorized in the 19th century that’s where they came from. They called themselves scientists, but they were scientists with no science, scientific methods had not been developed to be able explore the body and look at the genetic structure and such.
So they came up with theories that this Aryan race arose in the Caucasus, in fact Iran is a derivative of the word Aryan. The Aryan arose and their tribes went north, south, east and west. The ones who went south went to India, the ones who went east went to China. The theory is that China was a great civilization and India was a great civilization because of this Aryan injection of culture. But then the Aryan lost the whiteness of its seed by mating with Chinese and Indian females so the Aryan greatness was lost in those countries. …
How deeply did Theodore Roosevelt adhere to these theories? How much had he internalized them?
From our point of view it’s as if these are distant theories, and maybe you could hold them. In our parlance we would say a person is choosing to be a racist or not. The word racist didn’t come into use until the 1930s. Theodore Roosevelt was not a racist, he subscribed to the racial theory that the editor of the New York Times did, that his entire cabinet did, that almost every educated person in the United States did. These were not some weird ideas off to the side. This was how the world worked. This is why Theodore Roosevelt explained the Philippines and Asia to America in terms of these racial theories. He was a politician trying to talk in the vernacular of the people.
And another review of Imperial Cruise from Janet Maslin in the NY Times, Nov 18, 2009; one by Ronald Steel, also in the Times, April 21, 2010 and including a review of The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst and the Rush to Empire, 1898 by Evan Thomas. Some disagreement over Bradley’s conclusions are penned here at HNN.