Eric Weber
Dissertation Proposal
John Bull and Jim Crow: Trans-Atlantic Conversations about Race, Empire, and
Civilization, 1890-1910
In 1894, a group of British subjects, after meeting with anti-lynching activist Ida
B. Wells, formed the British Anti-Lynching Committee (BALC). As an organization,
their first act was to write letters to governors in the Southern United States urging them
to do more to stop the citizens of their states from brutally lynching Black men, which
Southerners did with appalling regularity; Southern governors responded to these British
intrusions with scorn, claiming that race relations in the British Empire demonstrated that
the Britons had no moral authority over the US South. This trans-Atlantic dialogue—an
exchange amongst southern and northern African Americans, white Southerners, and
British Liberals and Conservatives—articulated, compared, revised, challenged, and
defended concepts including race, empire, and civilization. By examining Southern
attitudes towards empire and empire’s relationship to the South, we can better understand
how Southerners helped construct global ideas about white supremacy and Anglo-Saxon
civilization. We can also see the roots of Southern anti-imperialism. Most of all, opening
up questions of race, civilization, and empire to international dialogues moves past
perceptions the US South as exceptional and instead positions it as one of many
connected sites of racial conflict and construction.
My dissertation examines conversations about race relations in the US South and
the British Empire. By looking at American and British conversations with and
perceptions of each other, we can see how diverse groups within each state forged and
contested racial and imperial ideologies. Only by studying how they conversed with and
1
about one another can we see the ways in which US racial constructions engaged and
deviated from British and European racial ideals. This project demonstrates the
contingency of racial constructions, the need to move beyond the nation-state in the study
of foreign relations, and the transnational character of race relations in the United States
and elsewhere.
My research brings together several strands of recent historiography that have
looked at the construction of American-British relations, American perceptions and
theories of racial hierarchies, and Southern legalization of Jim Crow. The first strand is
the history of American foreign relations itself. By looking towards the travels of people
and ideas across the Atlantic, my project moves the history of US foreign relations away
from a state-centered narrative. While much recent work has documented the roles of
gender and race in American foreign relations, the narrative it has created continues to
place white men at the center of the story.1 My project moves away from this focus,
turning instead to the ways in which men and women who were not agents of the state
looked upon international affairs.2 As Paul Kramer has demonstrated, American and
1
Connections between the United States and European empires have receieved scholarly
attention lately. Andrew Zimmerman recently explored the relationship between the
German empire and African American men and women and linked work regimes and
racial constructions in the US South to those in German Togo, see Andrew Zimmerman,
"A German Alabama in Africa: The Tuskegee Expedition to German Togo and the
Transnational Origins of West African Cotton Growers," The American Historical
Review 110 (2005): 1362-1398. Ann Laura Stoler’s most recent collection includes many
articles that look at the United States during the Age of Empire, see Ann Laura Stoler,
ed., Haunted by Empire; Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2006).
2
Daniel Rodgers and James Kloppenberg have examined transnational progressivism and
social democracy from the 1890s through the 1940s. While many of the people in their
works were not at the head of the state, they were part of an educated elite. My project
differs from theirs by looking at how the people of the South understood their
connections to and distinctions from the British empire rather than the development of
2
European imperialists looked to each other as rivals but also for ideas about empire and
race.3 By looking at the years before the United States actively engaged in empirebuilding in its own right, we can see how Americans came to view empire before they
knew they would have one of their own. This dissertation examines Southerners’
impressions of imperialism before they became its vocal opponents at the turn of the
century as they came to position their region as distinct from overseas empires.4
The second strand of recent historiography that this project engages is the
growing literature on the New South in the world. Scholars have demonstrated that, as the
New South encountered the world, it also built up a legal system of racial segregation that
placed white men above ‘inferior’ races.5 Similar to histories of US foreign relations, the
social democracy. See James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and
Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986) and Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a
Progressive Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998).
3
Paul A. Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the
British and United States Empires, 1880-1910,” Journal of American History, Vol. 88,
No. 4 (Mar., 2002), 1316. As Stuart Anderson has demonstrated, Anglo-Saxonism played
a significant role both in the construction of the United States as an imperial state and in
the developing rapprochement between the United States and the British Empire, see
Stuart Anderson, Race and Rapprochement: Anglo-Saxonism and Anglo-American
Relations, 1895-1904 (London: Associated University Presses, 1981).
4
For more on Southern opposition to American imperialism see Christopher Lasch “The
Anti-Imperialists, the Philippines, and the Inequality of Man,” Journal of Southern
History, 24:3 (August, 1958), pp. 319-331, Eric T.L. Love. Race over Empire: Racism
and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2004), and Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters
Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000)
5
Two works have examined the relationship of Southern political leaders to the world
during this period; neither explores the role of African Americans or their interactions
with other countries. See Joseph A. Fry, Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and U.S.
Foreign Relations, 1789-1973 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000) and
Tennant S. McWilliams, The New South Faces the World: Foreign Affairs and the
Southern Sense of Self, 1877-1950 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1988). Erin McClune has examined the growing population of white immigrants
on the South at this time and their effect on labor and race relations, see Erin Elizabeth
3
work on the New South in the world continues to privilege white men. Stephen Fry and
Tennant McWilliams both argue that race played a role in southern foreign relations, but
they do not place the US South within an imperial world that formulated theories of racial
hierarchies as it established white governments in Africa and Asia. The men who center
their narratives sought to bring the South further into the international economy but these
authors do not treat similar constructions of white supremacy in other parts of the world.
My project examines Southerners who looked abroad for allies and trade, but who also
saw the world as distinctly different from themselves. Their separation from the world is
evident in their constructions of whiteness and their interactions with advocates of AngloSaxonist doctrines. By placing race relations and race construction at the center of a
transnational narrative, my dissertation will examine how the New South participated in
imperial race formations and ideologies of white supremacy as it tried to promote itself to
the nation and the world.6
McClune, “Black Workers, White Immigrants, and the Postemancipation Problem of
Labor: the New South in a Global Perspective,” in Susan Delfino and Michelle Gillespie,
eds., Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 199-228. McWilliams focuses on the
tension between Southern anti-imperialism and imperialism, but his account centers
prominent white men in Southern politics and New South ideology. Instead, my account
focuses on Southern newspaper accounts of British imperialism to see how Southern
Americans viewed empire as well as asking how Southern African American men and
women saw imperialism.
6
Connections between the US South and South Africa are well-studied. My project
moves beyond the comparisons of white supremacist regimes in the early twentieth
century to look at how the US South participated in the construction of racial categories
across an imperial world. John W. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: the
Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the US South, (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1982) connects white supremacy in the US South to the development of
Apartheid in South Africa. My dissertation moves away from the comparisons of white
supremacy in these two places and looks at it within the broader history of American and
British imperialism. Sven Beckert. “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the
Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” American
4
Finally, the last strand of historiography looks at African Americans and their
relationship with the world outside of the United States. Within the last decade, scholars
have connected African Americans to American foreign relations, but the bulk of this
work discusses the twentieth century.7 My dissertation looks back to Ida B. Wells’s antilynching campaigns in England. Wells, whose anti-lynching speeches inspired the
creation of BALC, has received considerable scholarly attention over the last decade.
However, biographers have tended to accept uncritically her accounts of the trips she
made abroad rather than placing them within the context of British history and the
relationship between the United States and the British Empire.8 Their footnotes rarely
look at sources available outside of the United States.9 Similarly, Gail Bederman has
demonstrated how Wells subverted popular constructions of civilization as a white male
Historical Review, 109-5 (December 2004), 1405-1438 argues that after the American
Civil War, similar economic systems of tenant farmers and debt peonage developed
around cotton producers around the world and including the South. See also, Matthew
Guterl and Christine Skwiot, “Atlantic and Pacific Crossings: Race, Empire, and "the
Labor Problem" in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Radical History Review 2005 (91): 4061.
7
For more information on African American foreign relations, see Brenda Gayle
Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1965 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) and Michael L. Krenn, Black Diplomacy:
African Americans and the State Department, 1945-1969 (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1999).
8
See Patricia Ann Schechter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880-1930
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001) and Linda McMurry Edwards, To
Keep the Waters Troubled : the Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998).
9
They also contain errors about the membership of BALC. For example, Edwards
misreads newspaper accounts of BALC’s founding and incorrectly identifies its
members. John Gorst, who traveled to the US South to see race relations firsthand, is
identified as the Duke of Argyll. Argyll was, in fact, the head of BALC and a different
man who had served in Liberal governments. Gorst, in contrast, was the only
Conservative member of BALC, although he broke with the party in the 1890s over the
question of Irish Home Rule. See Edwards, 222 and 227.
5
preserve, while remaining focused on US theories about Anglo-Saxonism.10 Wells,
however, did not only subvert American racial hierarchies; her speeches attacked
Southern defenses of lynching by calling on Anglo-Saxonist notions of civilization, a
decidedly cross-Atlantic construction. As Wells’s case demonstrates, African Americans,
like white US Southerners, formed opinions about empire before the United States would
become an imperial power.11 By examining African American interactions with debates
about Anglo-Saxon civilization and empire, we can better approach Black commentary
on American foreign relations to see how they participated in or challenged racial
formations in the United States and the world.
My dissertation approaches international relations from the perspective of those
who traveled abroad and who wrote about other peoples rather than those who were
agents of the state. The first section will document attempts by Americans and Britons to
understand race relations in the US South and in the British Empire.12 My account begins
10
Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in
the United States, 1880-1917. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Though she
notes, “Wells spoke to British audiences, but her goal was to convince Americans that
their tolerance of lynching rendered them unmanly savages in the eyes of the civilized
world,” she does not discuss how the ‘civilized world’ participated in these debates, see
61.
11
For a look at African American engagement with American empire after 1898, see
Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1898-1903
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975). See also, Richard E. Welch, Jr., Response to
Imperialism: The United States and the Philippine-American War, 1899-1902 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). Recent works that examine the role of
race or gender in the making of US imperialism include: Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting
for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and
Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) and Paul A.
Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
12
Besides Clowes, South African Maurice Evans would also tour the US South. Evans
was a powerful advocate for racial separation in South Africa during the early twentieth
century, and he drew from his travels in the United States when advocating separation in
6
in 1890 when British journalist W. Laird Clowes journeyed to the United States and
toured the US South. Though normally the London Times’s naval correspondent, Clowes
detailed race relations in the Southern United States in a ten-part series published that
year.13 He saw the South through an imperial lens and described race relations there by
constantly referring back to the British Empire. Regularly citing the works of James
Anthony Froude (historian and defender of Caribbean racial oppression) and Henry
Morton Stanley (British explorer of Africa, American Civil War Veteran,14 and journalist
for the New York Herald), Clowes translated US Southern race relations into something
his British readers could recognize. Claiming to have spoken with the “best men,”
Clowes followed many American Southerners in calling Southern lynching a defense
against African male savagery. Accepting of racial oppression in the South, Clowes
linked American race relations to imperial constructions of racial inferiority.
After looking at international defenses of racial segregation, the next section
tackles the problem of the New South and empire. By looking at newspaper coverage
(both British and American) of British immigrant laborers in the South, American
imperialism, and the British empire, I will explore Southern impressions of imperialism
and British race relations. While Tennant McWilliams has examined Southern antiimperialism, like the vocal, racist, anti-empire speeches of South Carolina Senator Ben
Tillman, his account begins with the proposed annexation of Hawaii in 1890 not with the
his home country. See Maurice F. Evans, Black and White in the Southern States: A
Study of the Race Problem in the United States from a South African Point of View
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001). Evans’s book originally appeared
in 1916.
13
The ten-part series “The Negro Question in the United States” appeared in the Times of
London between November 1890 and January 1891
14
On both sides of the conflict.
7
world outside of US territory.15 The annexation of Hawaii is important in the
development of Southern anti-imperialism, but equally significant, were white Southern
interactions with European empires. Southerners did not only see the British Empire as a
competitor in the search for cotton markets. As white Southerners constructed labor
regimes that echoed many other regimes in the imperial world, they saw empire not as
similar to but as distinct from their own practices. This section will contextualize Wells’s
international anti-lynching campaign by documenting the prejudices that Southern
politicians already held concerning the British empire.
After this section, I will examine Ida B. Wells’s two speaking tours of England
and the conversations that they inspired. The responses to her trips from both sides of the
Atlantic highlight the nature of international ideas about race and the problematic and
contingent construction of them. This section will explore the men and women who made
up BALC. Several visited the United States before they saw Wells, and they would have
already had some impression as to the state of the South before she arrived to speak to
them. Prominent British Liberal politicians, women’s suffrage activists, and
Nonconformist ministers, BALC’s members were not anti-imperialist. Instead, they
tended to believe that imperialism should offer the benefits of Anglo-Saxon civilization
to lesser peoples rather than forcing them to work for the betterment of British colonists
or simply allowing them to become extinct (as dominant theories of racial stratification
believed that they would). In responding to BALC, white US Southerners and British
supporters defended white Southerners’ supposed need to lynch black men, and white US
Northerners took both sides. BALC and Wells will occupy a significant part of the
15
See McWilliams, The New South Faces the World.
8
dissertation because of the way their cases highlight tensions within the British Empire
and the United States as each defined white supremacy and blackness in ways that
legitimated violence against their subjects and citizens of color.
After looking at Wells and the British Empire, I will conclude by looking to
African American responses to American imperialism. Empire took a different form from
the perspective of African American activists and soldiers, and I will explore African
American participation in the imperial mission and constructions of themselves as
American during the legitimation of Jim Crow regimes in the US South. With the case of
the Philippine Conquest, African American men and women, soldiers and activists, saw
American imperialism both as a problem and as an opportunity. The racialized defense of
imperialism tended to leave them out of the American mission, yet their participation in it
could open space for them to claim full American citizenship which white Southerners
were actively denying them. In South Africa, tellingly, African American visitors
received honorary white status by virtue of their Americanness.16 By examining these
various sites of contact and commentary, we can better understand how international
events and transnational concepts intersect with and influence the construction and
performance of American race relations.
These individual cases will allow me not only to explore Americans’ interactions
with and commentary on the world outside of the country’s borders, but also to docunent
the international movement of ideas about race, civilization, and empire. During the
period covered by this dissertation, the United States built an empire that it designed in
16
See Robert Vinson, "Citizenship Over Race?: African Americans in American-South
African Diplomacy, 1890-1925," World History Connected November 2004. See also,
Zimmerman, “A German Alabama in Africa.”
9
opposition to European empires. However, European empires looked to the construction
of white supremacy in the US South for inspiration and instruction as they built race into
their colonial enterprises. By placing Jim Crow and the New South in a transnational
perspective and in dialogue with the British Empire, we can better see how the US South
fit into an imperial world.
Sources and Archives
The English-speaking, Atlantic world at the turn of the century was one in which
newspapers and journals passed national boundaries. The bulk of my work will involve
reading newspapers from 1890 through 1910 to see how these papers engaged
international events and conversations. In the South, I will concentrate on papers from
major cities that were involved in international trade and in the promotion of a New
South: Louisville, KY, Atlanta, GE, Raleigh, NC, Birmingham, AL, and Charleston, SC.
I will also examine the correspondence and personal papers of Southern governors at the
time of Wells’s trips to England and BALC’s letter writing campaign.
Clowes published his ten-part series as a book, which I will examine it in
conjunction with other British travelers’ accounts of the American South. Clowes was not
the only Briton to tackle the problem, as he saw it, of race relations in the US South;
these accounts will allow me to see how British writers understood the South and how
they interpreted Southern race relations. Of interest too will be published accounts in
international journals. Many English-language journals cultivated readers across the
Atlantic, and they commented upon race and empire in both the US and Great Britain.
10
In England, my research will focus on two goals: reading British newspaper
accounts of Wells’s campaigns and examining the personal papers of BALC members.
The British Library has an entire facility dedicated to preserving British newspapers. If
the clippings from Ida B. Wells’s records are any indication, her speeches received
considerable attention in religious and Liberal circles. Reading the full accounts that she
excerpted will help me better understand the reception that she received. Her personal
papers contain clippings from sympathetic newspapers; by traveling to British archives, I
will also search for unfavorable reviews of her campaigns. I will also look for articles
about race relations in the United States that do not have anything to do with Wells to see
if her trips caused British papers to rethink their position on lynching or merely supported
opinions that British papers already had. Many of BALC’s prominent members have left
their papers, and I will look through them to see what they can reveal about BALC’s
activities and its end—which remains mysterious with the evidence available in the
United States.
Finally, I will seek out collections of African American newspapers. While they
are more scarce than white newspapers, there are collections of them in Washington, DC
at Howard University and in Madison, WI. I will examine these collections to see how
Black newspapers covered Wells’s journeys and how they commented upon the British
Empire as well as the American one. At Howard University, I will also examine Henry
McNeal Turner’s papers. A Black minister, Turner visited South Africa in the 1890s.
Frederick Douglass’s papers may also reveal people that Wells encountered in England;
Douglass provided introductions for Wells when she left for England. African American
sources will allow me to explore the multiple and contested responses to empire and
11
African American attitudes toward the idea of a civilizing mission itself. Doing so will
look at Black understandings of their place in the world during a time when their own
country denied them their full rights as citizens and place American race relations within
the imperial world.
***********
The Age of Empire saw the further articulation of white supremacy at multiple
sites in European empires and the United States. By studying international discussions of
American race relations and white US Southern discussions of European empires and
placing them next African American responses to empire, my dissertation will open the
history of US foreign relations at the turn of the century to alternate voices. Instead of
concentrating at those at the head of the state or Southern white men who promoted their
region to the world, it looks to travelers and activists. They too participated in
transnational discussions of race, empire, and civilization. Their voices provide a means
of contextualizing the US South within a larger world. Americans looked at empire
before they had one of their own. In doing so, they either challenged their own citizens to
live up to their ideas of civilization or measured themselves against other peoples.
Looking at these conversations enriches our understanding of the history of Jim Crow
and its relationship to John Bull.
12