Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930

Dark Vanishings Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races,

1800-1930

\

Patrick Brantlinger

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

•

Copyright © 2003 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 4850. First published 2003 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2003 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-ill-Publication Data Brantlinger, Patrick, 1941Dark vanishings : discourse on the extinction of primitive races, 1800 -1930 I Patrick Brantlinger. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-80'4-380

Introduction

essentialism of the earlier race scientists, Darwin and his allies did just the reverse: evolution by natural selection meant that species, races, and even individuals were the creatures of contingency rather than of either design or biological essence. Moreover, the races were one species, not several, and the similarities among the races werc far greater than the differences. Nevertheless, the Darwinian view of the future of primitive races was just as grim as that of most of the pre­ Darwinians. Social Darwinists argued that nature's constant laws mandated the extinction of all unfit creatures and species to make room for new, supposedly fitter ones. Paradoxically one end point of extinction discourse, from the late nineteenth century on, was widespread anxiety about the degenera­ tion or even extinction of the white race, as in Madison Grant's Pass­ ing of the Great Race (1908). Evident in the eugenics movement, this anxiety is the focus of the concluding chapter. Anxiety about the fu­ ture of all the races of mankind- indeed, of the entire human species-was always impiicit in extinction discourse. The pervasive­ ness of that anxiety in the 1800s can be suggested by a glance at nov­ els by two authors, Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells, from opposite ends of the century. In Shelley's The Last Man (,826), the protagonist, Li­ onel Verney, witnesses the extinction of the entire human race. This catastrophe takes the form of imperialist expansion running in re­ verse: the plague that exterminates all mankind is, as Verney puts it, "of old a native of the East, sister of the tornado, the earthquake, and the simoom" (184). Further, Verney catches the plague from a dying "negro" in London. Soon there is no longer any escape to such "colonies" as "New Holland [Australia], Van Diemen's Land [Tasma­ nia], and the Cape of Good Hope" (185). With England already "des­ oiate," an invasion by diseased and starving Irish paupers com­ mences, "burning- laying waste- murdering. . . . They talked of taking London, conquering England" (233)' Shelley's tale of Gothic horror, in short, returns the "fatal impact" of imperialism abroad to its home base; The Last Man is in part an early instance of a reverse invasion story, as well as a fantasy about the ultimate extinction of the human species. In The War ofthe Worlds (1896), Wells imagines another "last mali" scenario involving an invasion of Martians. The extraterrestrials threaten to extinguish mankind before falling prey themselves to a disease to which they have no immunity. Wells declared that the in­ spiration for War of the Worlds came from a conversation with his

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Dark Vanishings

brother, Frank, about "the discovery of Tasmania by the Europeans­ a very frightful discovery for the native Tasmanians!" (quoted in Bergonzi, 124). At the start of the twenty-first century, with as many genocidal con­ Aids occurring around the world as at any time in the past, and with various apocalyptic scenarios and predictions of the extinction of the entire human race a familiar feature of global mass culture, "last of the race" and "last man" fantasies such as those by Shelley and Wells do not seem far-fetched. 16 They certainly would not have seemed far­ fetched to the Tasmanians or to members of other "primitive races" over the last several centuries.

2 . Pre-Darwinian Theories on the Extinction of Primitive Races

B efore the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (,859), three

types of supposedly scientific discourse dealt with the extinction of primitive races. The first was "natural history," a broad rubric that embraced both geology and biology. The taxonomies of organisms of­ fered by Carl von Linneaus, Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Jo­ hann Friedrich Blumenbach, and Georges Cuvier included hierar­ chizing accounts of the human races, with the white or "Caucasian" race leading the parade. Further, through the geological "record of the rocks," massive evidence of the extinction of numerous nonhu­ man species was being unearthed, though Linnaeus, Thomas Jeffer­ son, and many others resisted it well into the nineteenth century (Banton, 3-4)' For Darwin and the Victorians, the key text about the geological history of the earth, about fossils, and therefore about the extinction of species was Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (,83033) · The second, emergent science that contributed to extinction dis­ course was economics. Especially in the second, ,803 edition of his Essay on Population, the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus offers a wide range of information and speculation about the population dy­ namics of both civilized and primitive societies. Although he does not emphasize race, Malthus has, for good reason, been called "the founding father of scientific racism" (Chase, 6). For Malthus, both '7

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"savages" and the feckless, starving Irish are key examples. Because of its emphasis on the causes of depopulation as well as overpopulation, Malthus's Essay has much to say about human mass extinctions. In the preface to Origin, moreover, Darwin credits Malthus as the main source for his own central theme of "the struggle for existence" among both human and nonhuman populations. The third, at least nascent science concerned with racial extinc­ tions was anthropology. In the eighteenth century the study of human cultures and customs took the form of moral philosophy or natural history or some combination of the two, as in Scottish Enlighten­ ment history. But it gained increasing disciplinary distinctness and in­ fluence from the 1830S on, partly through the pressures of colonial ex­ pansion, which lent urgency to attempts to understand the behaviors of indigenous peoples throughout the world. Through roughly the first half of the nineteenth century, however, anthropology was mainly concerned with the physical, mental, and hierarchical differ­ ences among the races (whether considered as separate species or not). In 1842 the Ethnological Society of London emerged as a sepa­ rate enterprise from the Aborigines Protection Society, and the same year saw the founding of the American Ethnological Society. In both contexts, the shift toward science entailed a move away from earlier humanitarian interest in the fates of primitive peoples (Stocking, 273; Stepan, 45-46). All three of these supposedly scientific, often overlapping dis­ courses supported a view of savagery as a Hobbesian state of nature, a bellum omnium contra omnes in which the strong exterminated or en­ slaved the weak. For natural historians, economists, and ethnologists alike, savagery itself waS often, by definition, a sufficient explanation for the extinction of some, if not all, savage races. Writing about sci­ entific attempts to explain or explain away the extinction of the Tas­ manian aborigines, John Cove notes that, in terms of their ideological meaning and utility, there was no difference between those attempts and "religious explanations." What the two types of explanation, sci­ entific and religious, "had in common was a kind of fatalism which underwrote an uncritical stance toward European colonization and government policy. If any human agency had to be blamed for nega­ tive consequences, it was the Aborigines themselves who either re­ jected God's commands or were innately inferior and therefore un­ able to compete successfully with Europeans" (Cove, 44-45).

Pre-Darwinian Theories

Eighteenth-century natural history posed four basic questions about human races. First, were the different races mere varieties of a single species or were they separately created, multiple species? Monogenesis or the single-species thesis was consistent with the bib­ lical account of creation; the different races could then be seen as originating at the time of the Aood, with Noah's curse on his son Ham producing, by degeneration, the Negro or African race. But polygenesis could also be reconciled with the Bible, though not so easily, by positing the existence of "pre-Adamite" peoples (Popkin, 40-42). The Bible, then, only pertained to Semitic and Caucasian peoples, not to Africans, Native Americans, Mongolians, and so on. Second, just how many distinct races were there? Were some races primary and relatively unchanging, while others were mixed, inter­ mediate, and changing or even dwindling away of their own accord? Third, what were the laws or natural causes governing the purity ver­ sus the hybridization of races? Was racial mixing a version of degener­ ation and also, perhaps, of the dying out of certain races, as these were absorbed into the "blood" or "stock" of vigorous, more populous races? And fourth, what was the hierarchy of races in historical, moral, intellectual, and religious terms? Which were the superior and which the inferior races? Correlatively, and most important in re­ lation to extinction discourse, were some or all the inferior races in­ capable of progress-that is, of becoming civilized? [n On the Natural History of Mankind (1775) Blumenbach opined, partly through comparing the shapes of skulls from various races, that there were five primary races: "Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay" (264). That the different races all formed one species he saw no reason to doubt (276). He was also less inclined than many later natural historians to attribute simplistic moral or in­ tellectual traits to the different races. Thus, about Africans, Blumen­ bach writes: The assertion that is made about the Ethiopians, that they come nearer the apes than other men, I willingly allow so far as this, that it is in the same way that the solid-hoofed . . . variety of the domestic sow may bc said to come nearcr to the horse than other sows. But how little weight is for the most part to be attached to this sort of comparison is clear from this, that there is scarcely any other out of the principal varieties of mankind, of which one nation or

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Dark Vanishings other, and that too by careful obselVcrs, has not been compared, as far as the face goes, with the apes. (271)

Blumenbach's version of craniology and physical anthropology served as a model for other pre-Darwinian natural historians, includ­ ing Georges Cuvier, Peter Camper, Anders Retzius, Count Gob­ ineau, Charles Hamilton Smith, james Prichard, Robert Knox, and the "American School" of Samuel Morton, josiah Not!, and George Glidden. Camper contributed the measurement of facial angle as a supposedly scientific way to distinguish the races, and Retzius added the "cephalic index," the basis for later craniology or the measure­ ment of skulls and hence supposedly of intelligence (Haller; Gould, Mismeasure; jahoda, 71-74). Published in the mid-1850S, Gobineau's multivolume Inequality of Human Races represents one "culmina­ tion of pre-Darwinian ideas" (Barkan, 16), whereas, in the United States, Not! and Glidden's Types of Mankind (1854) represents an­ other. These works point ahead to social Darwinism and the eugenics movement, which carried over into the first half of the twentieth cen­ tury and are still evident in versions of sociobiology, as in the recent controversy over the "bell curve."\ Cuvier, less cautious than Blumenbach about attributing moral and intellectual traits to the different races, identifies three primary "varieties" of the single species, Homo sapiens, ranging a number of secondary types among these. His three main varieties are '\ the fair, or Caucasian variety; 2, the yellow, or Mongolian; 3, the Negro, or Ethiopian" (1:97). He is not sure whether "the American" variety is primary or intermediate, between Mongolian and Caucasian, and so, too, regarding the Malays and Papuans. For Cuvier, the Caucasian variety "is chiefly distinguished by the beautiful form of the head," and from it "have sprung the most civilized nations, and such as have most generally exercised dominion over the rest of mankind" (1:97). In contrast, though the Mongolian "race" has "formed mighty em­ pires" in the past, "its civilization has long appeared stationary" (1:97)' And the "negro race," with its "compressed cranium," "mani­ festly approaches to the monkey tribe. The hordes of which this vari­ ety is composed have always remained in a state of complete bar­ barism" (1:97)' As with Adam Smith and the economists, for Cuvier there are tluee basic social conditions, correlated with his three pri­ mary races: progressive (civilized); stationary (semi-civilized); and nonprogressive (savage or completely "barbaric").

Pre-Darwinian Theories

Cuvier rejected notions of evolution, but, given the temporal hier­ archy involved in any conception of progress, it was easy for later race scientists to assume that one stage or "race" might develop into the next, though also that regression could occur as readily as progress. History, it seemed, was primarily the tale of the rise and rail of civi­ lizations, which could be explained in terms of racial difference. Even if present-day savages had not developed, the barbaric ancestors of civilized peoples-the Anglo-Saxons, for example-had had the ability to progress to civilization, which made the seemingly nonpro­ gressive status of present-day savages appear all the more permanent and hopeless. The temporal paradigm also suggested to some theorists that the different races of humanity were, so to speak, mere stepping-stones along a linear, progressive route the white race alone was able to travel. Thus, in Vestiges orCrealion (,844), Robert Chambers specu­ lated that the Negro, Malay, Indian, and Mongolian races were all obsolescent stages in "the development of the highest, or Caucasian type" (307) -' Why those lower races should continue to exist after their primary function-the emergence of the Caucasian race-had been fulfilled, Chambers did not try to explain. Nevertheless, he be­ lieved that the human races belonged to a single species and that civ­ ilizations had many independent points of origin among all the races (and not just in the "Caucasian type"). Chambers also argued that the general tendency of human as of cosmic history was progressive and not retrogressive, though he main­ tained that the development of the human races (as opposed to stages of civilization) had been retrogressive. "The greater part" of human­ ity, he writes, "must be considered as having lapsed or declined from the original type": In the Caucasian or Indo-European family alone has the primitive organiz­ ation been improved upon. The Mongolian, Malay, American, and Negro, comprehending perhaps five-sixths of mankind, are degenerate. (309)

Chambers based this opinion partIy on a racialized version of embry­ ology, which demonstrated, to his satisfaction at least, that embryos recapitulated not only the phylogeny of different species of animals but also of the different races of humans, starting with the most in­ fantile (the Negro race) and ending with the most mature (the Cau-

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Dark Vanishings

casian) (308). This argument suggested, in turn, that the outcome of historical "development" or I�. 187, I(}O

245

'46

Indcx 99.102, 1°4-1°7. 152, 154. 156, 166, 167, 16-116, ,87 •

Irish nationalism. See Fenians; Young Ireland Iroquois, 3. 54-55 Irving, Washington, 62

173, 184, 187, 192,

1-97, 100-101, 106, 108, llO. 114-116, 119, 121, 125-127, 130-135, 137, 151, 153, 158, 159, 180-181, 182, 187, 190. See also London Missionary Society; Mission 155-156, 158. 159, 162, 165, 17°, 177, I� Schoolcraft, Henry, 53-54 Scott. Sir Walter, 61-62. 81 Selwyn, George AugushlS, 8-<j Semitic race, 19 Ser.ior, Nassau, 35. 103-1°4. 109 Shaka (Chaka), 92 Shelley, Mary, 15-16, 29, uS, 192 Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 26 Shiel. M. P., 192, 198 Sidney, Sir Henry, 94, 97 Sigcrson, George, 103 Simms, William Gilmore, 63�

247

248

Index Slavery, 9. 13. 37. 38, 39, 40 . 41, 54t 56• 60,

68-75, 79, 84, 85, 86-SQ, 90. 9,. 08. Q9. 182, 183. 187. 197

Smiles, Samuel, 145 Smith, Adam, 20, 31-32, 33. 36, 70, 172, 193 Smith, Charles Hamilton, 20, 37-39. 40, 42, 44> 139

Smith, Fanny Cochrane, 138 Smith, Sir Harry, qo Social Darwinism, s. 12, 15. 10, 138--139. 154. 160-162, 176-183. 184-187. UP-196

Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowl. edge, 156-157 Sociobiology, 20, 190 Sociology, 177-178 Somerset, Lord Charles, 81 South Africa, 2, 4. 5. 9. 10, 13. 15. 42. #. 70,

71, 73--86, 87. 89. 90-