The brutality of all national development is apparent, and we make no excuse for it. To conceal it would be a denial of fact; to glamour it over, an apology to truth. There is little in life that is not brutal except our ideal. As we increase the aggregate of individuals and their collective activities, we increase proportionately their brutality.
GENERAL HOMER LEA
In this world the nation that has trained itself to a career of un-warlike and isolated ease is bound, in the end, to go down before other nations which have not lost the manly and adventurous qualities.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
In 1898 the United States waged a three-month war with Spain. It took the Philippine Islands from Spain by treaty and formally annexed the Hawaiian Islands. In 1899 the United States partitioned the Samoan Islands by agreement with Germany, and expressed its policy toward western interests in China in the “Open Door” note. In 1900 Americans took part in suppressing the Chinese Boxer Rebellion. By 1902 the Army had finally suppressed insurrection in the Philippines; and in that year the islands were made an unorganized territory.
As the United States stepped upon the stage of empire, American thought turned once again to the subjects of war and empire; opponents and defenders of expansion and conquest marshaled arguments for their causes. After the fashion of late nineteenth-century thought, they sought in the world of nature a larger justification for their ideals.
The use of natural selection as a vindication of militarism or imperialism was not new in European or American thought. Imperialists, calling upon Darwinism in defense of the subjugation of weaker races, could point to The Origin of Species, which had referred in its subtitle to The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. Darwin had been talking about pigeons, but the imperialists saw no reason why his theories should not apply to men, and the whole spirit of the naturalistic world-view seemed to call for a vigorous and unrelenting thoroughness in the application of biological concepts. Had not Darwin himself written complacently in The Descent of Man of the likelihood that backward races would disappear before the advance of higher civilizations?1 Militarists could also point to the harsh fact of the elimination of the unfit as an urgent reason for cultivating the martial virtues and keeping the national powder dry. After the Franco-Prussian War both sides had for the first time invoked Darwinism as an explanation of the facts of battle.2 “The greatest authority of all the advocates of war is Darwin,” explained Max Nordau in the North American Review in 1889. “Since the theory of evolution has been promulgated, they can cover their natural barbarism with the name of Darwin and proclaim the sanguinary instincts of their inmost hearts as the last word of science.”3
It would nevertheless be easy to exaggerate the significance of Darwin for race theory or militarism either in the United States or in western Europe. Neither the philosophy of force nor doctrines of Machtpolitik had to wait upon Darwin to make their appearance. Nor was racism strictly a post-Darwinian phenomenon. Gobineau’s Essai sur l’Inégalité des Races Humaines, a landmark in the history of Aryanism, was published in 1853–55 without benefit of the idea of natural selection. As for the United States, a people long familiar with Indian warfare on the frontier and the pro-slavery arguments of Southern politicians and publicists had been thoroughly grounded in notions of racial superiority. At the time when Darwin was still hesitantly outlining his theory in private, racial destiny had already been called upon by American expansionists to support the conquest of Mexico. “The Mexican race now see in the fate of the aborigines of the north, their own inevitably destiny,” an expansionist had written. “They must amalgamate or be lost in the superior vigor of the Anglo-Saxon race, or they must utterly perish.”4
This Anglo-Saxon dogma became the chief element in American racism in the imperial era; but the mystique of Anglo-Saxonism, which for a time had a particularly powerful grip on American historians, did not depend upon Darwinism either for its inception or for its development. It is doubtful that such monuments of English Anglo-Saxon historical writing as Edward Augustus Freeman’s History of the Norman Conquest of England (1867–79) or Charles Kingsley’s The Roman and the Teuton (1864) owed much to biology; and certainly John Mitchell Kemble’s The Saxons in England (1849) was not inspired by the survival of the fittest. Like other varieties of racism, Anglo-Saxonism was a product of modern nationalism and the romantic movement rather than an outgrowth of biological science. Even the idea that a nation is an organism that must either grow or fall into decay, which doubtless received an additional impetus from Darwinism, had been invoked before 1859 by the proponents of “Manifest Destiny.”5
Still, Darwinism was put in the service of the imperial urge. Although Darwinism was not the primary source of the belligerent ideology and dogmatic racism of the late nineteenth century, it did become a new instrument in the hands of the theorists of race and struggle. The likeness of the Darwinian portrait of nature as a field of battle to the prevailing conceptions of a militant age in which von Moltke could write that “war is an element of the order of the world established by God . . . [without which] the world would stagnate and lose itself in materialism,” was too great to escape attention. In the United States, however, such frank and brutal militarism was far less common than a benevolent conception of Anglo-Saxon world domination in the interests of peace and freedom. In the decades after 1885, Anglo-Saxonism, belligerent or pacific, was the dominant abstract rationale of American imperialism.
The Darwinian mood sustained the belief in Anglo-Saxon racial superiority which obsessed many American thinkers in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The measure of world dominion already achieved by the “race” seemed to prove it the fittest. Also, in the 1870’s and 1880’s many of the historical conceptions of the Anglo-Saxon school began to reflect advances in biology and allied developments in other fields of thought. For a time American historians fell under the spell of the scientific ideal and dreamed of evolving a science of history comparable to the biological sciences.6 The keynote of their faith could be found in E. A. Freeman’s Comparative Politics (1874), in which he allied the comparative method with the idea of Anglo-Saxon superiority. “For the purposes of the study of Comparative Politics,” he had written, “a political constitution is a specimen to be studied, classified, and labeled, as a building or an animal is studied, classified, and labeled by those to whom buildings or animals are objects of study.”7
If political constitutions were to be classified and compared by Victorian scholars as if they were animal forms, it was highly probable that the political methods of certain peoples would be favored over others. Inspired by the results of the comparative method in philology and mythology, particularly by the work of Edward Tylor and Max Müller, Freeman tried, using this method, to trace the signs of original unity in the primitive institutions of the Aryans, particularly in the “three most illustrious branches of the common stock—the Greek, the Roman, and the Teuton.”
When Herbert Baxter Adams set up his great historical seminar at Johns Hopkins, it was with the official blessing of Freeman; and Freeman’s dictum, “History is past politics and politics is present history,” was emblazoned on the historical studies that came pouring forth from Adams’ seminar. A whole generation of historians receiving their inspiration from the Johns Hopkins school could have said with Henry Adams, “I flung myself obediently into the arms of the Anglo-Saxons in history.”8 The leading notion of the Anglo-Saxon school was that the democratic institutions of England and the United States, particularly the New England town meeting could be traced back to the primitive institutions of the early German tribes.9 In spite of differences in detail, the Hopkins historians were in general agreement on their picture of the big, blond, democratic Teuton and on the Teutonic genealogy of self-government. The viewpoint of the school was given a fitting popular expression in 1890 with the publication of James K. Hosmer’s Short History of Anglo-Saxon Freedom, which drew upon the whole literature of Anglo-Saxondom to establish the thesis that government of the people and by the people is of ancient Anglo-Saxon origin. Wrote Hosmer:
Though Anglo-Saxon freedom in a more or less partial form has been adopted (it would be better perhaps to say imitated) by every nation in Europe, but Russia, and in Asia by Japan, the hopes for that freedom, in the future, rest with the English-speaking race. By that race alone it has been preserved amidst a thousand perils; to that race alone is it thoroughly congenial; if we can conceive the possibility of the disappearance among peoples of that race, the chance would be small for that freedom’s survival . . .10
Hosmer shared the optimism of his English contemporary John Richard Green, who believed that the English-speaking race would grow in enormous numbers and spread over the New World, Africa, and Australia. “The inevitable issue,” concluded Hosmer, “is to be that the primacy of the world will lie with us. English institutions, English speech, English thought, are to become the main features of the political, social, and intellectual life of mankind.”11 Thus would the survival of the fittest be written large in the world’s political future.
What Hosmer did for Anglo-Saxon history, John W. Burgess did for political theory. His Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law, published in the same year as Hosmer’s book, serves as a reminder of German as well as English influences in the American Anglo-Saxon cult; for Burgess, like Herbert Baxter Adams, had received a large part of his graduate training in Germany. The peculiarity of his work, Burgess declared, was its method. “It is a comparative study. It is an attempt to apply the method, which has been found so productive in the domain of Natural Science, to Political Science and Jurisprudence.” It was Burgess’ contention that political capacity is not a gift common to all nations, but limited to a few. The highest capacity for political organization, he believed, has been shown, in unequal degrees, by the Aryan nations. Of all these, only “the Teuton really dominates the world by his superior political genius.”
It is therefore not to be assumed that every nation must become a state. The political subjection or attachment of unpolitical nations to those possessing political endowment appears, if we may judge from history, to be as truly a part of the world’s civilization as is the national organization of states. I do not think that Asia and Africa can ever receive political organization in any other way. . . . The national state is . . . the most modern and complete solution of the whole problem of political organization which the world has yet produced; and the fact that it is the creation of Teutonic political genius stamps the Teutonic nations as the political nations par excellence, and authorizes them, in the economy of the world, to assume the leadership in the establishment and administration of states. . . . The Teutonic nations can never regard the exercise of political power as a right of man. With them this power must be based upon capacity to discharge political duty, and they themselves are the best organs which have as yet appeared to determine when and where this capacity exists.12
Theodore Roosevelt, who had been Burgess’ student at Columbia Law School was also inspired by the drama of racial expansion. In his historical work, The Winning of the West, Roosevelt drew from the story of the frontiersman’s struggle with the Indians the conclusion that the coming of the whites was not to be stayed and a racial war to the finish was inevitable.13 “During the past three centuries,” wrote the young scholar-in-politics, “the spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world’s waste spaces has been not only the most striking feature in the world’s history, but also the event of all others most far-reaching in its effects and its importance.” This great expansion he traced back many centuries to the days when German tribes went forth to conquest from their marshy forests. American development represents the culminating achievement of this mighty history of racial growth.14
The writings of John Fiske, one of the earliest American synthesizers of evolutionism, expansionism, and the Anglo-Saxon myth, show how tenuous could be the boundary between Spencer’s ideal evolutionary pacifism and the militant imperialism which succeeded it. A kindly man, whose thought was grounded in Spencer’s theory of the transition from militancy to industrialism, Fiske was not the sort to advocate violence as an instrument of national policy. Yet even in his hands evolutionary dogma issued forth in a bumptious doctrine of racial destiny. In his Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, Fiske had followed Spencer in accepting the universality of conflict (outside of family relationships) as a fact in savage society; he believed it an effective agent in selection.15 But the superior, more differentiated and integrated societies had come to prevail over the more backward by natural selection, and the power of making war on a grand scale had become concentrated in the hands of “those communities in which predatory activity is at the minimum and industrial activity at the maximum.” So warfare or destructive competition gives place to the productive competition of industrial society.16 As militancy declines, the method of conquest is replaced by the method of federation.
Fiske, who had long believed in Aryan race superiority,17 also accepted the “Teutonic” theory of democracy.18 This doctrine sanctified any conquest incidental to Anglo-Saxon expansion. English victories over France in the eighteenth-century colonial struggles represented a victory for industrialism over militancy. The American victory over Spain and the acquisition of the Philippines Fiske interpreted as the high point in a conflict between Spanish colonization and superior English methods.19
In 1880, when he was invited to speak before the Royal Institute of Great Britain, Fiske gave a series of three lectures on “American Political Ideas” which became widely known as a statement of the Anglo-Saxon thesis. Fiske praised the ancient Roman Empire as an agency of peace, but argued that it had been inadequate as a system of political organization because it failed to combine concerted action with local self-government. The solution to this ancient need could be provided by representative democracy and the local self-government embodied in the New England town. By retaining the rustic democracy of America’s Aryan forefathers, American federal organization would make possible an effective union of many diverse states. Democracy, diversity, and peace would be brought into harmony. The dispersion of this magnificent Aryan political system over the world, and the complete elimination of warfare, was the next step in world history.
With characteristic Darwinian emphasis upon race fertility, Fiske dwelt upon the great population potential of the English and American races. America could support at least 700,000,000; and the English people would within a few centuries cover Africa with teeming cities, flourishing farms, railroads, telegraphs, and all the devices of civilization. This was the Manifest Destiny of the race. Every land on the globe that was not already the seat of an old civilization should become English in language, traditions, and blood. Four-fifths of the human race would trace its pedigree to English forefathers. Spread from the rising to the setting sun, the race would hold the sovereignty of the sea and the commercial supremacy which it had begun to acquire when England first began to settle the New World.20 If the United States would only drop its shameful tariff and enter into free competition with the rest of the world, it would exert such pressure, peacefully of course, that the states of Europe would no longer be able to afford armaments and would finally see the advantages of peace and federation. Thus, according to Fiske, would man finally pass out of barbarism and become truly Christian.21
Even Fiske, who was accustomed to platform success, was astonished at the enthusiasm evoked by these addresses in England and at home.22 The lecture on “Manifest Destiny,” published in Harper’s in 1885, was repeated more than twenty times in cities throughout the United States.23 By request of President Hayes, Chief Justice Waite, Senators Hoar and Dawes of Massachusetts, General Sherman, George Bancroft, and others, Fiske gave his lectures again at Washington, where he was feted by the politicos and presented to the Cabinet.24
As a spokesman of expansion, however, Fiske was but a small voice compared with the Rev. Josiah Strong, whose book Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, appeared in 1885 and soon sold 175,000 copies in English alone. Strong, then secretary of the Evangelical Society of the United States, wrote the book primarily to solicit money for missions. His uncanny capacity for assimilating the writings of Darwin and Spencer to the prejudices of rural Protestant America makes the book one of the most revealing documents of its time. Strong exulted in the material resources of the United States, but he was dissatisfied with its spiritual life. He was against immigrants, Catholics, Mormons, saloons, tobacco, large cities, socialists, and concentrated wealth—all grave menaces to the Republic. Still he was undaunted in his faith in universal progress, material and moral, and the future of the Anglo-Saxon race. He employed the economic argument for imperialism; and a decade before Frederick Jackson Turner he saw in the imminent exhaustion of the public lands a turning point in national development. It was Anglo-Saxonism, however, that brought him to the highest pitch of enthusiasm. The Anglo-Saxon people, the bearers of civil liberty and pure spiritual Christianity, said Strong,
. . . is multiplying more rapidly than any other European race. It already owns one-third of the earth, and will get more as it grows. By 1980 the world Anglo-Saxon race should number at least 713,000,000. Since North America is much bigger than the little English isle, it will be the seat of Anglo-Saxondom.
If human progress follows a law of development, if “Time’s noblest offspring is the last,” our civilization should be the noblest; for we are “The heirs of all the ages in the foremost files of time,” and not only do we occupy the latitude of power, but our land is the last to be occupied in that latitude. There is no other virgin soil in the North Temperate Zone. If the consummation of human progress is not to be looked for here, if there is yet to flower a higher civilization, where is the soil that is to produce it?25
Strong went on to show how a new and finer physical type was emerging in the United States, bigger, stronger, taller than Scots or Englishmen. Darwin himself, Strong noted triumphantly, had seen in the superior vigor of Americans an illustration of natural selection at work, when he wrote in The Descent of Man:
There is apparently much truth in the belief that the wonderful progress of the United States, as well as the character of the people, are the results of natural selection; for the more energetic, restless, and courageous men from all parts of Europe have emigrated during the last ten or twelve generations to that great country, and have there succeeded best. Looking to the distant future, I do not think that the Reverend Mr. Zincke takes an exaggerated view when he says: “All other series of events—as that which resulted in the culture of mind in Greece, and that which resulted in the empire of Rome—only appear to have purpose and value when viewed in connection with, or rather as subsidiary to . . . the great stream of Anglo-Saxon emigration to the west.”26
Returning to his theme that the unoccupied lands of the world were filling up, and that population would soon be pressing upon subsistence in the United States as in Europe and Asia, Strong declared:
Then will the world enter upon a new stage of its history—the final competition of races for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled. If I do not read amiss, this powerful race will move down upon Mexico, down upon Central and South America, out upon the islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond. And can anyone doubt that the result of this competition of races will be the “survival of the fittest”?27
Although concrete economic and strategic interests, such as Chinese trade and the vital necessity of sea power, were the prominent issues in the imperial debate, the movement took its rationale from more general ideological conceptions. The appeal of Anglo-Saxonism was reflected in the adherence to it of political leaders of the expansion movement. The idea of inevitable Anglo-Saxon destiny figured in the outlook of Senators Albert T. Beveridge and Henry Cabot Lodge and of John Hay, Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, as well as the President himself. During the fight for the annexation of the Philippines, when the larger question of imperial policy was thrown open for debate, expansionists were quick to invoke the law of progress, the inevitable tendency to expand, the Manifest Destiny of Anglo-Saxons, and the survival of the fittest. Before the Senate in 1899, Beveridge cried:
God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. . . . He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savages and senile peoples.28
In the most memorable of his imperialist exhortations, “The Strenuous Life” (1899), Theodore Roosevelt warned of the possibility of national elimination in the international struggle for existence:
We cannot avoid the responsibilities that confront us in Hawaii, Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines. All we can decide is whether we shall meet them in a way that will redound to the national credit, or whether we shall make of our dealings with these new problems a dark and shameful page in our history. . . . The timid man, the lazy man, the man who distrusts his country, the over-civilized man, who has lost the great fighting, masterful virtues, the ignorant man, and the man of dull mind, whose soul is incapable of feeling the mighty lift that thrills “stern men with empires in their brains”—all these, of course, shrink from seeing the nation undertake its new duties. . . .
I preach to you, then, my countrymen, that our country calls not for the life of ease but for the life of strenuous endeavor. The twentieth century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world.29
John Hay found in the impulse to expand a sign of an irresistible “cosmic tendency.” “No man, no party, can fight with any chance of final success against a cosmic tendency; no cleverness, no popularity avails against the spirit of the age.”30 “If history teaches any lesson,” echoed another writer a few years later, “it is that nations, like individuals, follow the law of their being; that in their growth and in their decline they are creatures of conditions in which their own volition plays but a part, and that often the smallest part.”31 The question of the Philippines was sometimes pictured as the watershed of American destiny; our decision would determine whether we should undergo a new expansion greater than any in the past, or fall back into decline as a senile people. Said John Barrett, former minister to Siam:
Now is the critical time when the United States should strain every nerve and bend all her energies to keep well in front in the mighty struggle that has begun for the supremacy of the Pacific Seas. If we seize the opportunity we may become leaders forever, but if we are laggards now we will remain laggards until the crack of doom. The rule of the survival of the fittest applies to nations as well as to the animal kingdom. It is a cruel, relentless principle being exercised in a cruel, relentless competition of mighty forces; and these will trample over us without sympathy or remorse unless we are trained to endure and strong enough to stand the pace.32
Charles A. Conant, a prominent journalist and economist troubled about the necessity of finding an outlet for surplus capital, “if the entire fabric of the present economic order is not to be shaken by a social revolution,” argued that
. . . the law of self-preservation, as well as that of the survival of the fittest, is urging our people on in a path which is undoubtedly a departure from the policy of the past, but which is inevitably marked out by the new conditions and requirements of the present.33
Conant warned against the possibility of decadence if the country did not seize upon its opportunities at once.34 Another writer denied that a policy of colonial expansion was anything novel in American history. We had colonized the West. The question was not whether we should now enter upon a colonial career but whether we should shift our colonizing heritage into new channels. “We must not forget that the Anglo-Saxon race is expansive.”35
Although the Anglo-Saxon mystique was called upon in the interests of expansion by might, it also had its more pacific side. Its devotees had usually recognized a powerful bond with England; the historians of the Anglo-Saxon school, stressing the common political heritage, wrote about the American Revolution as if it were a temporary misunderstanding in a long history of common political evolution, or a welcome stimulant to flagging Anglo-Saxon liberties.
One outgrowth of the Anglo-Saxon legend was a movement toward an Anglo-American alliance which came to rapid fruition in the closing years of the nineteenth century. In spite of its unflagging conviction of racial superiority, this movement was peaceful rather than militaristic in its motivation; for its followers generally believed that an Anglo-American understanding, alliance, or federation would usher in a “golden age” of universal peace and freedom.36 No possible power or combination of powers would be strong enough to challenge such a union. This “English-speaking people’s league of God for the permanent peace of this war-worn world,” as Senator Beveridge called it, would be the next stage in the world’s evolution. Advocates of Anglo-American unity believed that Spencer’s transition from militant to pacific culture, and Tennyson’s “Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World,” were about to become a reality.
James K. Hosmer had appealed in 1890 for an “English-Speaking Fraternity” powerful enough to withstand any challenge by the Slavs, Hindus, or Chinese. This coalescence of like-minded states would be but the first step toward a brotherhood of humanity.37 Yet it was not until 1897 that American interest in an English alliance resulted in a movement of consequence, which received the support of publicists and statesmen as well as littérateurs and historians. During the war with Spain, when continental nations took a predominantly hostile attitude toward American interests, Britain’s friendliness stood out in welcome relief. Common fears of Russia and a feeling of identity of interests in the Far East were added to the notion of a common racial destiny. The Anglophobia which had been so persistent among American politicians—Roosevelt and Lodge had been among the bitterest—was considerably relieved. The anti-imperialist Carl Schurz felt that what he rather prematurely took to be the complete dissipation of anti-English feeling was one of the best results of the Spanish-American War.38 Richard Olney—who as Cleveland’s Secretary of State during the Venezuela dispute had defiantly told Britain that the fiat of the United States is law in the Western Hemisphere—now wrote an article on “The International Isolation of the United States” to point out the benefits of British trade and to warn against pursuing an anti-British policy at a time when our country stood alone in the world.39 Arguing that “family quarrels” were a thing of the past, Olney expressed his hope for Anglo-American diplomatic cooperation, and reminded his readers: “There is a patriotism of race as well as of country.” Even the navalist Mahan approved of the British, and although he had felt for some time that a movement for union was premature, he was sufficiently friendly to be content to let the British retain naval supremacy.40 For a short time at the close of the century the Anglo-Saxon movement became the rage among the upper classes, and statesmen spoke seriously of a possible political alliance.41
The Anglo-Saxon cult, however, had to pull against the great mass of the population, whose ethnic composition and cultural background rendered them immune to its propaganda; and even among those of Anglo-Saxon lineage the dynamic appeal of the cult was confined to the years of excitement at the turn of the century. The term “Anglo-Saxon” offended many people, and meetings of protest against Anglo-Saxonism were called in some of the western states.42 Suspicion of England, traditional in American politics, could not be overcome. John Hay complained in 1900 of “a mad-dog hatred of England prevalent among newspapers and politicians.”43 When the movement for Anglo-American Union was revived again during the First World War, the term “English-speaking” was used in preference to “Anglo-Saxon,” and racial exclusiveness was no longer featured.44 The powerful undertow of American isolation that followed the war, however, swept away this movement once again.
Anglo-Saxonism in politics was limited both in scope and in duration. It had its day of influence as a doctrine of national self-assertion, but as a doctrine of Anglo-Saxon world order its effects were ephemeral. Even the benevolent ideal of the dreamers of a Pax Anglo-Americana found practical meaning only as a timely justification of a temporary rapprochement inspired by the needs of Realpolitik. The day had not come when world peace could be imposed by a “superior” race confident in its biological blessings and its divine mission.
Lacking an influential military caste, the United States never developed a strong military cult audacious enough to glorify war for its own sake. Such outbursts as Roosevelt’s “Strenuous Life” speech were rare; and it was also rare for an American writer to extol war for its effects upon the race, although Rear Admiral Stephen B. Luce, one of Mahan’s patrons, once declared that war is one of the great agencies of human conflict and that “strife in one form or another in the organic world seems to be the law of existence. . . . Suspend the struggle, well called the battle of life, for a brief space, and death claims the victory.”45 Most writers on war seemed to agree with Spencer that military conflict had been highly useful in developing primitive civilization but had now long outlived its value as an instrument of progress.46
The advocates of preparedness did not usually take the stand that there is anything inherently desirable in war, but rather quoted the old maxim, “If you wish for peace, prepare for war.” “Let us worship peace, indeed,” conceded Mahan, “as the goal at which humanity must hope to arrive; but let us not fancy that peace is to be had as a boy wrenches an unripe fruit from a tree.”47
Others took the position that strife is inherent in the nature of things and must be anticipated as an unhappy necessity. Once the martial fever of the short and easy war with Spain had subsided, the psychology of the American people between 1898 and 1917 was surprisingly nervous and defensive for a nation that was rapidly rising in stature as a world power. Encouraged by the eugenics movement, men talked of racial degeneracy, of race suicide, of the decline of western civilization, of the effeteness of the western peoples, of the Yellow Peril. Warnings of decay were most commonly coupled with exhortations to revivify the national spirit.
One of the most popular among the pessimistic writers was an Englishman, Charles Pearson, who had formerly served the Empire as minister of education in Victoria. His melancholy book, National Life and Character, published in England and the United States in 1893, offered a discouraging prognosis for western culture. The higher races, Pearson believed, can live only in the temperate zone, and will be forever barred from effective colonization in the tropics. Overpopulation and economic exigencies will give rise to state socialism, which will extend its tentacles into every corner of western national life. Because of the increasing dependence of the citizen upon the state, nationalism will grow, and religion, family life, and old-fashioned morality will decline. There will also be a consolidation of peoples into great centralized empires, for only these will have the capacity to survive. Large armies, great cities, huge national debts will hasten cultural eclipse. The decline of competition, coupled with state education, will render the intellect more mechanical in its operations and deprive it of the initiative that alone is capable of outstanding achievement in the arts. The result will be a world of old people, scientific rather than esthetic, unprogressive, stable, without adventure, energy, brightness, hope, or ambition. Meanwhile other races will not fail in vitality, for biology shows that the lower are more prolific than the higher. Chinese, Hindus, Negroes cannot be exterminated, but will on the contrary be likely to challenge the supremacy of western civilization by industrial rather than military means. Perhaps the best that the governing races can do is to face the future with courage and dignity.
It is idle to say that if all this should come to pass our pride of place will not be humiliated. We were struggling among ourselves for supremacy in a world which we thought of as destined to belong to the Aryan races and to the Christian faith; to the letters and arts and charm of social manners which we have inherited from the best times of the past. We shall wake to find ourselves elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside by peoples whom we looked down upon as servile, and thought of as bound always to minister to our needs. The solitary consolation will be that the changes have been inevitable. It has been our work to organize and create, to carry peace and law and order over the world, that others may enter in and enjoy. Yet in some of us the feeling of caste is so strong that we are not sorry to think we shall have passed away before that day arrives.48
Pearson’s fears were the beginning of a reaction from the optimism expressed by Fiske and Strong in the 1880’s. For middle-class intellectuals, reeling under the shock of the panic of 1893 and the deep social discontents of the prolonged depression that followed, his prophecies of doom had a ring of truth. They were particularly suited to the dark mood that overcame Henry Adams in the 1890’s. He wrote to C. M. Gaskell:
I am satisfied that Pearson is right, and that the dark races are gaining on us, as they have already done in Haiti, and are doing throughout the West Indies and our Southern States. In another fifty years, at the same rate of movement, the white races will have to reconquer the tropics by war and nomadic invasion, or be shut up, north of the fortieth parallel.49
To his brother, Brooks Adams, pessimism was more than a matter of private despair. In his study of The Law of Civilization and Decay (1896), he set forth his own version of the deeper historical principles behind the façade of social change. The law of force and energy is universal, said Adams in a passage somewhat reminiscent of Spencer, and animal life is only one of the outlets through which solar energy is dissipated. Human societies are forms of animal life, differing in energy according to their natural endowments; but all societies obey the general law that the social movement of a community is proportionate to its energy and mass, and that its degree of centralization is proportionate to its mass. The surplus energetic material not expended by a society in the daily struggle for life can be stored as wealth, and the stored energy is transmitted from one community to another either by conquest or by superiority in economic competition. Every race sooner or later reaches the limit of its warlike energy and enters upon a phase of economic competition. Surplus energy, when accumulated in such bulk as to preponderate over productive energy, becomes the controlling social force. Capital becomes autocratic. The economic and scientific intellect grows at the expense of imaginative, emotional, and martial arts. A stationary period may supervene, lasting until it is terminated by war or exhaustion or both.
The evidence, however, seems to point to the conclusion that, when a highly centralized society disintegrates, under the pressure of economic competition, it is because the energy of the race has been exhausted. Consequently, the survivors of such a community lack the power necessary for renewed concentration, and must probably remain inert until supplied with fresh energetic material by the infusion of barbarian blood.50
In subsequent volumes, America’s Economic Supremacy (1900) and The New Empire (1902), Adams worked out a materialistic interpretation of society based upon physics, biology, geography, and economics. Surveying the rise and decline of historic states, he attributed changes in supremacy to changes in basic trade routes. The center of economic civilization, now once again in transit, he saw coming to rest in the United States; but he warned that “supremacy has always entailed its sacrifices as well as its triumphs, and fortune has seldom smiled on those who, beside being energetic and industrious, have not been armed, organized, and bold.”51
Nature tends to favor organisms that operate most cheaply—that is, with the most economic expenditure of energy. Wasteful organisms are rejected by nature; they can be eliminated by commerce if not by conquest. Adams was particularly anxious about a possible conflict with Russia in the east, for which he thought the United States should be well armed.52 Concerning the tendency toward centralized empires, he wrote:
Moreover, Americans must recognize that this is war to the death,—a struggle no longer against single nations but against a continent. There is not room in the economy of the world for two centres of wealth and empire. One organism, in the end, will destroy the other. The weaker must succumb. Under commercial competition, that society will survive which works cheapest; but to be undersold is often more fatal to a population than to be conquered.53
More influential than Brooks Adams was Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose book The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890) had made him the world’s most prominent exponent of navalism. In The Interest of America in Sea Power (1897), in which he urged that the country pursue a stronger policy than the present one of “passive self-defense,” Mahan pointed out:
All around us now is strife; “the struggle of life,” “the race of life,” are phrases so familiar that we do not feel their significance till we stop to think about them. Everywhere nation is arrayed against nation; our own no less than others.54
Theodore Roosevelt was among those who tried to stir the nation against the eventualities predicted by Pearson and foreseen by Brooks Adams. For Pearson’s pessimism he saw little excuse; although he conceded that civilized nations were not destined to rule the tropics, he could not believe that the white races would lose heart or become intimidated by the tropic races. When western institutions, and democratic government itself, spread to the tropics, the danger of an overpowering industrial competition would be considerably less; and it seemed unlikely that high industrial efficiency would be achieved without a marked degree of westernization. He was somewhat more favorably impressed with the work of his friend Brooks Adams, but again the most pessimistic prophecies aroused Roosevelt to reply. He did not believe that the martial type of man necessarily decays as civilization progresses; pointing to the examples of Russia and Spain, he argued that the phenomenon of national decline should not be too closely identified with advancing industrialism. Only when Adams mentioned the failure to produce enough healthy children did he touch upon the real danger to our society.55 This was a theme dear to Roosevelt’s heart. Vociferously fearful of the menace of race decadence through decline in the birth rate, he never tired of the theme of reproduction and motherhood. If marriages did not produce an average of four children, the numbers of the race could not be maintained. He warned that if the process of racial decay continued in the United States and the British Empire, the future of the white race would rest in the hands of the German and the Slav.56
Associated with fears of racial decline and of the loss of fighting fiber was the menace of the Yellow Peril, which was much talked about between 1905 and 1916.”57 The prevailing western attitude toward Japan had been friendly until the Japanese victory over Russia in 1905. However, with the convincing demonstration of the Japanese martial prowess, attitudes changed, just as they had toward Germany after her victory in 1871.58 In the United States, fear of the Japanese was especially strong in California, where oriental immigration had been resented for over thirty years.59 The sensational press took up the Japanese menace and exploited it to the point of stimulating occasional war scares.60
In 1904 Jack London, always a strenuous advocate of racial assertiveness, warned in an article in the San Francisco Examiner of the potential threat to the Anglo-Saxon world if the organizing and ruling capacities of the Japanese should ever gain control of the enormous working capacity of the great Chinese population. The impending racial conflict, he thought, might come to a head in his own time.
The possibility of race adventure has not passed away. We are in the midst of our own. The Slav is just girding himself up to begin. Why may not the yellow and brown start out on an adventure as tremendous as our own and more strikingly unique?61
Hugh H. Lusk believed that the Japanese menace was only a small part of a general reawakening of the Mongolian race, whose urge to expansion, motivated by the age-old population problem, might soon send it out over the Pacific and ultimately to southwestern America and to the gates of the United States via Mexico.62 Talk of the Yellow Peril reached its height just before the First World War, when congressmen spoke openly of inevitable conflict in the Pacific.63
Perhaps the closest American approximation to the German militarist writer General von Bernhardi was General Homer Lea, a colorful military adventurer who fought against the Boxer Rebellion, and later became an adviser to Sun Yat-sen. Lea’s militarism was based directly upon biology. He believed that nations are like organisms in their dependence upon growth and expansion to resist disease and decay.
As physical vigor represents the strength of man in his struggle for existence, in the same sense military vigor constitutes the strength of nations; ideals, laws and constitutions are but temporary effulgences, and are existent only so long as this strength remains vital. As manhood marks the height of physical vigor among mankind, so the militant successes of a nation mark the zenith of its physical greatness.64
Militancy may be divided into three phases: the militancy of the struggle to survive, the militancy of conquest, and the militancy of supremacy or preservation of ownership. It is in the first stage, the struggle to survive, that the genius of a people reaches its height; the harder this struggle, the more highly developed is the military spirit, with the result that conquerors often arise from desolate wastes or rocky islands. The laws of struggle and survival are universal and unalterable, and the duration of national existence is dependent upon the knowledge of them.
Plans to thwart them, to short-cut them, circumvent, to cozen, to scorn and violate [them] is folly such as man’s conceit alone makes possible. Never has this been tried—and man is ever at it—but what the end has been gangrenous and fatal.65
Lea warned of the possibility of Japanese invasion of the United States, and argued that a war with Japan would be settled by land campaigns, for which the country needed a much larger army. Without such a military establishment, the West Coast would stand in deadly danger of invasion. The strategy of such an invasion Lea had planned in full detail.
Lea further warned that the Saxon races were flouting the laws of nature by permitting the militancy of their people to decline. A decadent tendency to let individual wants take precedence over the necessities of national existence threatened Anglo-Saxon power throughout the world, he believed. The United States, submerged by a flood of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants, was ceasing to be the stronghold of a Saxon race. The British Empire was in serious danger from the colored races. The day of the Saxon was ending. For the impending struggle between the Germans and the Saxon race, the latter was ill equipped. There was only one antidote for Anglo-Saxon decline: greater militancy. A confederation would be weak in war, but universal compulsory military service might check the already alarming decline.66
The advocates of preparedness made a biological appeal similar to Lea’s. Hudson Maxim, an inventor of smokeless powder, and brother of Hiram Maxim, the inventor of the Maxim gun, published a volume called Defenseless America (1914), which was widely distributed by Hearst’s International Library. “Self-preservation,” Maxim warned, “is the first law of Nature, and this law applies to nations exactly as it applies to individuals. Our American Republic cannot survive unless it obeys the law of survival.” He argued that man is by nature a struggling animal, that human nature has always been more or less the same. To be unprepared for the struggle would be to risk extinction, but preparedness might avert war.67
A similar philosophy could be found among the wartime leaders of the organized preparedness movement.68 S. Stanwood Menken, chairman of the National Security League’s Congress of Constructive Patriotism, warned the delegates that the law of the survival of the fittest applied to nations, and that the United States could assert its fitness only through a national reawakening.69 General Leonard Wood was skeptical of the possibility of suppressing war, which, he said, “is about as difficult as to effectively neutralize the general law which governs all things, namely the survival of the fittest.”70 Although the biological argument for militarism was hardly the dominant note among American leaders, it did give them a cosmic foundation that appealed to a Darwinized national mentality.
In 1898, when the problem of expansion had arisen, the anti-imperialists had not been inclined to answer the racial appeal or to dislocate it from its Darwinian framework. They preferred to ignore the broad theme of racial destiny, concentrating instead upon an appeal to American traditions. The accident of party alignment doubtless had something to do with the unwillingness of politically minded anti-expansionists to assault the dogma of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority; for the Democratic Party, strongest in the Solid South, was the bulwark of the opposition, and to deny the Anglo-Saxon myth would serve only to stir up a race question without answering the fundamental arguments of expansionist leaders. What some Democrats did do, however, was to invert the racial aspect of expansion and use it as an argument against annexation of overseas territories. The idea was advanced in Congress, particularly by some of the Southern members, that to assume the government of the Filipinos would be to introduce into our political structure an alien, uncongenial, unassimilable people, probably incapable of reaching Anglo-Saxon heights in the matter of democratic self-government. Senator John W. Daniel of Virginia declared in 1899:
There is one thing that neither time nor education can change. You may change the leopard’s spots, but you will never change the different qualities of the races which God has created in order that they may fulfill separate and distinct missions in the cultivation and civilization of the world.71
Men of scientific training had not yet taken the advanced position on racial equipotentiality that anthropology now encourages, and the notion had not been widely popularized. Exceptions there were, of course. In 1894 Franz Boas, in his fresh and skeptical address as vice-president of the Anthropological Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, had made a cogent criticism of prevailing attitudes toward the colored races. The unwarranted assumption was commonly made, he pointed out, that because the whites’ state of civilization is “higher,” their racial aptitudes are higher. The standards of white culture are naïvely posited as a norm, and every deviation from the norm is automatically considered characteristic of a lower type. Boas attributed the cultural superiority of Europeans to the circumstances of their historical development rather than to inherent capacities.72
William Z. Ripley’s substantial study of The Races of Europe (1897) also introduced educated readers to some of the complexities of the idea of race, and discredited the Aryan myth. Among others than specialists or curious laymen, however, there was little understanding of these matters, and for the practical purposes of partisan discussion the complacent assertions of the Anglo-Saxon myth were unanswerable except by appeals to other prejudices. Common among men of learning was the conception, taken over from Haeckel’s Biogenetic Law, that, since the development of the individual is a recapitulation of the development of the race, primitives must be considered as being in the arrested stages of childhood or adolescence—“half devil and half child,” as Rudyard Kipling had said.73 This view was accepted by the eminent psychologist and educator G. Stanley Hall in his study of Adolescence. Although Hall felt that the childlike character of backward peoples entitled them to tender and sympathetic treatment by their phylogenetic “elders,” who should be ashamed to make war on children, the condescending approach to primitive culture underlying the recapitulation theory was not calculated to disturb the spokesmen of racial superiority.74
It took a measure of courage, in this climate of opinion, to issue a challenge to the dogma of racial inequality. There were few who would go so far as Ernest Howard Crosby, an American disciple of Tolstoi, who wrote of “an Anglo-Saxon union for the vulgarization of the world,” and implied in his famous parody of Kipling that the benefits of western civilization were not the ideal thing for the slow peoples of outlying islands.75 However, support came from William James, who thought we had “destroyed in Luzon the one sacred thing in the world, the spontaneous budding of a national life.”76 While few anti-imperialists were ready to challenge the basic assumption of white or Anglo-Saxon superiority, there were some who doubted the benefits of spreading civilization by conquest or annexation. These skeptics might well have agreed with the colored trooper in one of the regiments dispatched to suppress Aguinaldo’s rebels in the Philippines, who remarked in a moment of war-weariness, “Dis shyar white man’s burden ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.”77
The most usable argument for the anti-imperialists was to appeal to the traditions of Americanism, a procedure that introduced no new and unfamiliar ideas. Expansion, it was argued, would mean the adoption of races alien in language, customs, and institutions. It would mean the beginnings of a colonial bureaucracy. It would be aping the way of Britain. It would involve the support of a large standing army, with a consequent heavy tax burden. To launch upon the government and exploitation of a helpless people would shame the finest traditions of American democracy, which had always insisted upon the legitimacy of government only with the consent of the governed. A nation so rich and great within its own continental borders had no pressing need for further expansion; it would risk much to gain little. Launching upon an imperial career would bring America full square into the game of world politics, with all its militaristic hatreds and extravagances. Behind this would lurk the constant menace of war for the defense of overseas possessions.78
One of the most spirited of the anti-imperialists was William James, who at one time served as vice-president of the Anti-Imperialist League. From time to time James wrote indignant letters to the Boston Evening Transcript denouncing expansionist ideology. Of the white-man’s-burden, manifest-destiny thesis, he complained:
Could there be a more damning indictment of that whole bloated idolatered “modern civilization” than this amounts to? Civilization is, then, the big, hollow, resounding, corrupting, sophisticating, confusing torrent of mere brutal momentum and irrationality that brings forth fruits like this!79
In a counterblast to Roosevelt’s speech on the “Strenuous Life,” he asserted that Roosevelt was “still mentally in the Sturm und Drang period of early adolescence,” making speeches about human affairs “from the sole point of view of the organic excitement and difficulty they may bring,” and gushing over war as the ideal condition of human society. Of worthwhile ends Roosevelt had “not a word . . . one foe is as good as another, for aught he tells us. . . . He swamps everything together in one flood of abstract bellicose emotion.”80
William Graham Sumner also attacked the imperial impulse with practically all the weapons in the arsenal of the anti-expansionists. Those who were familiar with Sumner’s crisp iconoclasm on the subject of democracy may have rubbed their eyes to see the intransigent schoolmaster attack imperialists for preparing the abandonment of the nation’s democratic principles; but his argument had an unquestionable ring of sincerity, particularly since it once again put in jeopardy his position at Yale. “My patriotism,” he cried, “is of the kind which is outraged by the notion that the United States never was a great nation until in a petty three months’ campaign it knocked to pieces a poor, decrepit, bankrupt old state like Spain.”81
Probably the best known of all the peace advocates and anti-expansionists was David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University. More than any other man, Jordan established in the American mind the idea that war is a biological evil rather than a biological blessing, because it carries off the physically and mentally fit and leaves behind the less fit. Jordan, who had lost an elder brother in the Civil War, in 1898 became interested in disarmament and the movement for international arbitration. An eminent biologist and a leader of the eugenics movement, he turned his attention to the biological aspects of war. In a series of volumes published between the Spanish-American War and the First World War, Jordan expounded his thesis, using motley evidence from anthropometrics, casualty statistics, reminiscences of Civil War veterans, and the conclusions of other biologists. Darwin himself, Jordan pointed out, had agreed that war is dysgenic.82 Jordan became the favorite butt of patriots, militarists, and preparedness advocates, who pointed to continued racial improvement in past eras of constant warfare as evidence against his thesis.83
Although Jordan was unsuccessful in imposing his quasi-pacifistic outlook upon the nation, he did leave a profound conviction of the degenerative effect of war upon the breed; and his doctrine, strengthened by the general reaction against militarism in the years after the First World War, became sanctified by repetition in the most conventional of sources. The editor of the Saturday Evening Post, for example, wrote in 1921:
Disarm or die. That is the alternative that confronts all men who dare look. Men who are not afraid to face facts know that just as Nature kills off the weak and unfit, so war wipes out the strong and courageous and robs the race of its most vital blood.84
Ironically, the United States entered the First World War in the name not of militarism but of anti-militarism. The consequence was that the wartime climate of opinion was, on the whole, hostile to biological militarism. This, it was felt, was the enemy’s philosophy. To intellectuals, the social Darwinism of Machtpolitik was an integral part of the philosophy they were fighting against.85 A feature of the image of brutal German military leadership that emerged from the war literature was the idea that the German mind was dominated by a self-conscious, willful, iron-mailed philosophy of immoralism. The Germans, it was maintained, worshiped Treitschke, Nietzsche, von Bernhardi, and other militarists, who assured them that they were the élite of mankind, a race of supermen destined to conquer Europe or the world, who preached that might makes right, that war is a biological necessity, and that conquest is justified by the survival of the fittest. There was a sudden efflorescence of popular interest in Nietzsche and von Bernhardi. “The name of Nietzsche,” commented Paul Elmer More, as early as October 1914, “is beginning by the aid of the daily press to take on a sinister meaning for the man on the street.”86
British and American scholars who ransacked the literature of German chauvinism did not fail to produce damaging evidence. To “a good war halloweth any cause” and similar effusions from the pen of Nietzsche could be added a long series of damning quotations. “The old churchmen preached of war as a just judgment of God,” Klaus Wagner had said in his Krieg (1906); “the modern natural scientists see in a war a propitious mode of selection.”87 “War,” said von Bernhardi in his widely reprinted Germany and the Next War,
. . . is not merely a necessary element in the life of nations but an indispensable factor of culture, in which a truly civilized nation finds the highest expression of strength and vitality . . . War gives a biologically just decision, since its decisions rest on the very nature of things. . . . It is not only a biological law, but a moral obligation, and, as such, an indispensable factor in civilization.88
The war brought a veritable avalanche of anthologies of similar offensive sayings taken from German philosophers, statesmen, and military leaders. The most scholarly of these, Conquest and Kultur, Aims of the Germans in Their Own Words, edited by Wallace Notestein and Elmer E. Stoll, was issued under the auspices of George Creel’s Committee on Public Information, and thus received official sanction. The historian and biographer William Roscoe Thayer, who was especially active in propagating this interpretation of the German mentality, declared:
In all directions the Germans saw proof that they were the Chosen People. They interpreted the doctrine of evolution so as to draw from it a warrant for their aspirations. Evolution taught that “the fittest survived.”
The champions of the philosophy of supermania lean heavily on biology to support their creed. They have been misled by the phrase “the survival of the fittest” You might infer, to hear them buzz, that only the fittest survive, or, to put it conversely, the fact that you survive is proof that you are the “fittest.”89
When those who had actually read Nietzsche pointed out that he had nothing but contempt for German chauvinism,90 it was said that the dominant idea emerging from his acknowledged contradictions was that of German diplomacy and German militarism.91 Bishop J. Edward Mercer, alarmed at the tendency to show that Nietzsche’s thought derived from Darwinism, wrote a defense of Darwin for the English Nineteenth Century, playing up Darwin’s theory of the moral sense and dissociating him from Nietzsche.92 The conventional image persisted, however, and was accepted even by scholars who knew Germany well.93
The necessity of combatting the philosophy of force led Professor Ralph Barton Perry into a formidable assault upon social Darwinism and all its works. His Present Conflict of Ideals (1918) was the most substantial of all the refutations of the Darwinized ethics and sociology that had culminated in the monstrosities attributed to von Bernhardi and Nietzsche.94 The whole evolutionary dogma, the Darwin-Spencer legacy of progress, the glib optimism of John Fiske, the warnings of Benjamin Kidd, the natural-selection economics of Thomas Nixon Carver—all fell under Professor Perry’s axe. Like William James before him, Perry pointed out the essential circularity of the Darwinian sociology, in which power and strength are defined in terms of survival, and survival is in turn explained by strength and power. In the Darwinian view, all changes in types of survival and kinds of fitness are considered without relation to ulterior values; there is no value beyond survival itself. Rome conquering the world by force of arms is as good as Greece conquering it by force of ideas or Judea conquering it by force of religious sentiment. Indeed, because of its biological origins, this view actually shows a “strong tendency to favor the cruder and more violent forms of struggle, as being more unmistakably biological.”95
Pacifists also took advantage of the reaction from the philosophy of force.96 At the instance of Norman Angell, George Nasmyth published in 1916 his Social Progress and the Darwinian Theory, a popularization of the work of Kropotkin and the Russian sociologist Jacques Novicow, the most eminent continental critic of social Darwinism.97 “Instead of subjecting it to the searching analysis demanded by its practical social importance,” Nasmyth declared, “the intellectual world and public opinion has accepted ‘social Darwinism’ uncritically and by almost unanimous consent as an integral part of the theory of evolution.” For this he believed Spencer was chiefly responsible. The primary biological error of social Darwinism is its habit of ignoring the physical universe, of assuming that the cause of progress is not the struggle of man with his environment but rather the struggle of man with man, which in fact yields nothing. Another error is the misinterpretation of the “fittest” as the strongest or even the most brutal, while to Darwin it meant merely the best adapted to existing conditions. Struggle is also confused with the total death of the vanquished, whereas this selective factor hardly ever operates among men. The entire phenomenon of mutual aid is ignored by the philosophy of force. It is to this that man owes his dominant position in the universe. In a large sense, all mankind is an association, and all wars are civil wars; yet the philosophers of force have never advocated civil war as a source of progress.98
With the exception of a few noteworthy books the subject of sociology is still in a state of complete incoherence. Biological phenomena are confused with social facts. Men who call themselves specialists in the subject can still seriously identify the relations between Germany and France, for example, with those between a cat and a rat without doing great injury to their reputation and without exciting much ridicule.99
There were curious by-products of this reaction against militarism. Vernon Kellogg, a biologist who had become acquainted with several German military leaders while serving under Herbert Hoover in Belgium during the First World War, reported in a volume on his experiences that the philosophy of the foe was a crude Darwinism ruthlessly applied to the affairs of nations.100 Coming to the attention of William Jennings Bryan, Kellogg’s book reinforced his fundamentalist conviction of the inherent evilness of evolutionary ideas and his determination to wage a crusade against them.101 John T. Scopes suffered not only for the theories of Darwin, but for Wilhelm as well. For many years Bryan had been troubled about the possible social implications of Darwinism. In 1905 E. A. Ross, then teaching at Nebraska University, had found Bryan reading The Descent of Man, and Bryan had told him that such teachings would “weaken the cause of democracy and strengthen class pride and the power of wealth.”102 Here, as in other matters, Bryan had sound intuitions that his intellect had not the power to discipline.