RACE VALUES AND RACE DESTINIES VeA * By Secretary GEORGE LUTHER CADY THE AMERICAN MISSIONARY ASSOCIATION 287 Fourth Avenue, New York City Eastern District Pacific District Western District 606 Congregational House 423 Phelan Building 19 South La Salle Street Boston, Mass. San Francisco, Cal. Chicago, 111 . . RACE VALUES AND RACE DESTINIES Secretary George Luther Cady Perhaps there are few who have entirely escaped the sense of disillusionment as they have come down from the stimulated and stimulating heights of the war — for horrible as it was, utterly blasphemous as it hurled itself upon us, yet there came with it a strengthening of some of the finest things of the human spirit and doors were opened to visions of a world to be, which lifted us up to the ecstatic heights of prophecy. Not to dwell upon other hopes turned to despair, who of us did not see as an aftermath of the wai , the dying of the fires of race prejudice, the coming of a new era of human brotherhood? When the shot was fired at Sarajevo, it summoned to the com- mon battlefield almost every race and color — the Englishman, the Scotchman, the Irishman, the Welshman, the Canadian, the Australian, the South African, the Indiaman, the Slav, the Italian, the Frenchman, the Montenegran, the Serbian, the Belgian. But the call to heroism and to the defence of human liberty was not answered alone by those who have most enjoyed its blessings and who, at least by their own judgment of themselves, belong to the cultured and civilized races of the earth, but there stood by their side the little yellow man from Asia with the same courage and intellect that once bruised the paw of the Great Bear, and the Chinaman was there with pick and shovel close to the firing line, and the Abyssinian was there with turban and flowing robe but with a sword unstained by cowardice, and the Indian was there by the thousands bringing that subtle courage and sense of battle- field which made him no despised foe in the days of our fathers, and then came three hundred thousand of those black sons of slavery whose color has become lightened by the steady infusion of three hundred years of the blood of their masters — these all marched in the common ranks, stood in the common trench, were carried back to a common hospital and slept at last in a common grave. 4 RACE VALUES AND RACE DESTINIES Did history ever perpetrate a bitterer satire than to summon those to fight for a democracy which had ever cast them outside of its privileges, and to fight for a world freedom which they them- selves had never yet tasted! For almost three hundred years we robbed them of their wages. We robbed wives of their husbands, husbands of their wives, mothers of their children and children of their mothers. We robbed women of the right to choose who should be the fathers of their children and children of the right to know who was their father and for fifty years of toilsome yet victorious climbing out of slavery, we robbed them of every right for which our Anglo-Saxon forefathers fought from before the Magna Charta to the Declaration of Independence and yet these soldiers of color fought on unfailingly cheered by the hope that when the world should be made safe for Democracy, that Democ- racy should be made safe for them, that when the rights of man, because he is a man, should be established in the earth, he and his suffering race should not be forgotten. But can any one be in doubt that the war has left us not with a new world but with the very same old world with some of its worst vices alarmingly intensified? Race Prejudice Revived It is surely no exaggeration to say that race prejudice is at its historical worst today. Race assertion flaming forth in brutal Japanized-Prussianism in Siberia and Korea, the dogs of race war tugging at the leash in China, smoldering under the surface in India, whetting its sword on a dozen frontiers in the Balkans, coming to its own in Arabia after six hundred years of oppression, weltering in blocd tn Poland’s century-soaked field, standing armed to the teeth cn every border around the broken empire of Germany! But what is of more world significance and to us of more peril, is the revival of race distinctions in our own land in most un-Christian forms. In this we may frankly admit that we Anglo-Saxons are well toward the forefront of offending — in that strutting, swaggering and Milgar talk al out this being a “white man’s world,” “taking up the white n an’s 1 urden” — the 1 urden not of serving but of ruling, and squatting upen cveiy choice 1 it of earth and crowding the so-eallid nations of lesser breed into the unlivable remnants. RACE VALUES AND RACE DESTINIES 5 Four Books There came to my hands this summer four books* which were black and yellow enough to have blotted out the sunshine from any other atmosphere than the rarified air and beautiful sunlight of my New Hampshire summer ho ne. One is not able to ju Ige whether “The Rising Tide of Color” by Lathrop Stoddard is the product of a lone brain poisoned by too much thinking, or whether it is representative of a much larger class — I fear he voices the sentiments of too many people of our race. He faces us with the fact that we are in a world of perhaps 1,700,000,000 people of whom 500,000,000 are yellow, 450.000. 000 are brown, and 150,000,000 are black and 550,000,000 are white — the white are outnumbered two to one. He tells us that the white race tends to double in 80 years, the yellow a id browns in 60 years and the blacks in 40 years — the whites are the slowest breeders and are slowing up every year. He tells us also that of the 53,000,000 square miles of land on the globe, 47.000. 000 are governed by this white race. The problem which the world is confronted with now is, how long will two-thirds of the human race be willing to allow ten-elevenths of the world’s surface to be governed by the other one-third of the world’s people? And this with some of the nations teeming with an overplus population and crying for the breast of mother earth and who will not be denied, for as Stoddard well reminds us “there is no more certain breeder of strife than the expansive urge of a fast-breeding people.” Race Heredity The menace receives added emphasis by a broader application of the laws of deterministic heredity. Twenty years ago I filled a shelf with books upon the rather popular study of the laws of heredity as applied to the individual especially the abnormal. McKim in his “Heredity and Human Progress” thought heredity so inevitable and so infallible that his only remedy was Carbonic Acid Gas for the undesirables lest they breed more and unchange- able undesirables. Now the same laws are brought to apply to a *“The Rising Tide of Color” by Lathrop Stoddard. “Mankind” by Seth K. Humphrey. “Dark Water” by W. E. B. Du Bois. “The Negro Faces America” by Herbert J. Seligmann. 6 RACE VALUES AND RACE DESTINIES race and Seth K. Humphrey in his “Mankind” has taken the experience and rules of breeding on the stock farm and laid them down upon the human family like the laws of the Medes and Persians which altereth not neither can be changed. He says: “We must never forget that since history began there has been no appreciable change in inheritable character traits — only in the infinite variety of their combinations. * * * It is a common mistake to regard non-Aryans as races in their infancy, delayed in maturing, and destined for later emergence. There is no basis for the belief that these races are following ages behind, in the footsteps of the Aryan * * * The search for racial ability to maintain the world’s civilization need not go one sten beyond the unmixed White.” Of course this is joined in by Stoddard (“Rising Tide of Color”) who declares with a finality that Mrs. Eddy would term “appo- dictical” — “We know that environment and education can develop only what heredity brings. We know that the acquirements of in- dividuals are either not inherited at all or are inherited in so slight a degree as to make no perceptible difference from genera- tion to generation. In other words we now know that heredity is paramount in human evolution, all other things being secondary factors.” And then it is an easy k leap to this conclusion if [we follow closely the logic of Stoddard, — “Unless every lesson of History is to be disregarded, we must conclude that black Africa is unable to stand alone. The black man’s numbers may increase prodigiously and acquire alien veneers, but the black man’s nature will not change.” All of which has a very familiar sound to anyone who has studied the history of the races and their relations to other races. With this same superiority speaks the ancient Hebrew of all that vast Gentile world. With no less scorn did the ancient Assyrian look upon the other races as he waded knee deep in their blood. Thus did the culture of the city of Athens view all barbarian hordes and thus did Rome look upon all the peoples of her vast empire. Without this we would have had no Prussianism and the Great War would never have turned earth into hell for four years. “Any group which desires material advantages from RACE VALUES AND RACE DESTINIES 7 the exploitation of another group always takes pains to char- acterize its victims as inferior.”* The Program of the Sword And how are we to meet this Rising Tide of Color — these ex- cessive millions and millions of black, yellow and red? We are not left in doubt at all by these writers and their followers — it is the old historic method which has filled the pages of history with wars, dug the trenches for the dead by the mile and mile, devasted cities and decimated populations again and again — the program of force. We are to meet this menace with every con- ceivable oppression, build our walls of race divisions higher and higher, stand upon our borders guarding them against these peoples not only with sword and cannon but with insulting as- sertions of our own race superiority and their ignoble inferiority and if that does not suffice we shall unsheathe the sword and fight for white civilization, for white culture, for the maintenance of the white dominance of the world. And this in books issued by Scribners with the imprint of 1920 — six years after Prussia took the sword to establish forever the permanency of the superior Teutonic Kultur over the inferior Latin and Anglo-Saxon de- generates! It may be that the underlying and unconscious causes of the war were economic, the urge of a people who had outgrown its territory, but the conscious motive was the assurance that their civilization and race values were so infinitely superior that all the rest of the world might perish better than that their own race advancement should be retarded. This poison began with Gobineau who wrote a book entitled “An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races.” If you will read his work you will find that “The Rising Tide of Color” is but Gobineau revamped, for the scientific assumptions of Gobineau are “first that races are un- equal by decree of nature; second that the Aryan is the only superior race, all others inferior; third, that mixture of race rapid- ly lowers quality and is the source of decline.” (Prof. Jastrow in The Outlook.) The first use of this thesis of Gobineau was in the defense of slavery. And then later it was taken up by Niet- sche and made the Gospel of a nation. The many arrogant race assumptions of the German leaders are too well known to spend *Seligmann, p. 30. 8 RACE VALUES AND RACE DESTINIES time upon them here but it is evident that a whole race had be- come obsessed with the sense of infinitely superior race values and Prof. Jastrow quotes from a letter from a Frankfort school girl to a Swiss girl as follows: “As a matter of fact, there is but one race worthy of ruling the world, and which has already attained the highest degree of civilization. The race is ours, the Prussians; for though we Ger- mans in general are the lords of the world, the Prussian is un- doubtedly the lord par excellence among the Germans. Is it not shameful that other nations, who have no right to existence on the earth, wish to diminish our heritage! We are the divine fruits and the others are only weeds. That is why our Emperor has decided to put an end to all these injustices and to extirpate the weeds.” This is no man of straw which we are called upon to face today. Those who really believe this doctrine as applied to the colored races of the world compared with the white, may be numbered by the thousands. The Question How long will the one billion colored peoples consent to be exploited, enslaved personally and industrially, flouted, despised, shut out of the privileges of civilization and justice, discriminated against in most invidious ways by a half billion of whites? How long before the world shall tremble with their revolt as they stand on their hind legs with faces fronting the stars in the light of the new day, none able to deny them the right to think? The Answer The answer is not wanting on the part of the yellow man. Over yonder two mighty races are awaking and as they stretch themselves they shake the world. One is a race not yet having found itself, with teeming millions, endowed with the finest brains of all modern races, with vast undeveloped resources both of manhood and material, proud of their past glories when our fathers were barbarians — some of us will live to see the day when China will demand an equal chair at the table of the nations and the open door will not be by the grace of the white man but open- ed and defended by her own mighty hand. And the Japanese proud of her past with the mighty deeds of her Samurai, with her RACE VALUES AND RACE DESTINIES 9 -civilization which looked down upon the modern England of Alfred emerging out of wild and untamed tribes; with her genius for deeds, with racial and individual ambitions second to none, with inventive anti imitative genius equal to her industrial tasks, with armies and navies which have and may again clip the claws of the white bear of the north, with industry which does not limit the product at one end and limit the hours at the other, with no anaemic aristocracy content with one pampered child and six poodle dogs, with colleges teeming with ambitious youths pressing hard on the heels of the white man’s child for every honor — the day for despising these nations with any prospect of keeping the peace of the world is passed. It is either brother- hood or war — and that war will be no child’s play. Jeng’niz Khan and his lieutenants may have marched through central Asia and left behind 18,500,000 slaughtered human beings but in such a modern conflict we may as well resign ourselves to the fact that the battlefield will not be strewn with yellow men alone. We who have made the Declaration of Independence our text book ought easily to understand Count Okuma when he declares for this yellow world, “All men are born equal. The Asiatics have the same claim to be called men as the Europeans them- selves. It is therefore quite unreasonable that the latter should have any right to predominate over the former.” Nor are we left in doubt as to the answer being now given by the black man. After more than two centuries of close contact with the highest civilization though in slavery, and after a half century of the slow and costly infiltration of education by our mission schools, a considerable minority of this people have emerged as leaders and thinkers and they have arrived at very articulate race consciousness and race hopes. But along with it there has come to them a clear and bitter consciousness of their race wrongs at the hands of the white man and especially at the hands of the Anglo-Saxon. Every thrust upward, every new achievement of members of their race, every slow, painful but sure victory in the industrial and economic world, every year which has decreased the percentage of illiterates and added to the number of college graduates, has brought them to a horizon from which they view their future and their wrongs. How long does this white man expect that a race which can start out of slavery empty-handed, without a dollar, without any education and in 10 RACE VALUES AND RACE DESTINIES fifty years own 600,000 homes, operate 980,000 farms, conduct 50,000 business enterprises, operate 100 insurance companies, conduct 400 newspapers and periodicals by the race and for the race, and graduate from our colleges this spring 540 of their own race — how long does the white man think this race will stand hat in hand submitting humbly to all the discriminations which are offered his people? The Black Man’s Handicap With the heaviest industrial burdens placed upon their shoul- ders in both north and south, they find that equal service does not demand equal pay and the door has been tightly closed to their participation in the Labor Unions. They face a hostile press, in fact a press which seems to have ioined in a strong conspiracy to fan every flame of race prejudice, and to shift to the black man every outbreak of lust or crime. What the utterly despicable Hearst papers have studiously attempted by lies, by trumped up charges, by every known appeal to self interest, to accomplish against the yellow man, that much of the press of America seems to have determined to do for the black. Wherever a riot breaks forth, it is found that the Press has been the chief incendiary. General Wood remarks after being in Omaha, “One of the first steps toward preservation of law and order should be the suppression of a rotten press, where there is one.” It was so in Omaha, in Chicago, in Washington as it was in Atlanta. The Negro knows that in his upward hope and aspiration, he starts handicapped by a hostile press which lies upon every breakfast table and office desk in America. He turns with hope to that last bulwark of democratic liberty, the courts of justice and here again he plays against loaded dice for he knows that Anglo-Saxon rules of procedure are reversed and every Negro is considered guilty until he is proven innocent. In Arkansas one man was recently sentenced to twenty-two years in prison without a single witness appearing against him and it took a jury seven minutes to send five Negroes to the electric chair. And we do not need to ask what the Negro thinks as he sees members of his race denied even an approach to the court but executed by mobs with Anglo-Saxon cruelty unsurpassed by the most lurid stories of the Hun in Belgium. RACE VALUES AND RACE DESTINIES 11 Failing in all of these, this people turn their desperate eyes to the National Capitol where once sat the Great Emancipator, that greatest Anglo-Saxon of whom Horace Greeley once said : “I doubt if any man, woman or child, white or black, bond or free, ever accosted or reached out a hand to Abraham Lincoln, and detected in his countenance or manner any repugnance or shrinking from the proffered contact, any assumption of supe- riority or betrayal of disdain.” But for some time they have known that the meanest white man is more welcome in our Capitol than the most intellectual and moral black man. A Jim Crow car may be irritating but a Jim Crow democracy is intolerable. Dark waters No wonder that the iron has entered his soul and that he is in intellectual and moral revolt. Prof. Du Bois in his “Darkwater” is the modern Prometheus chained to the rock with the vultures of class prejudice gnawing at his vitals, struggling and straining to bring down the fire of God to his people. Whatever one may say about the wisdom of his utterances in this heated hour, no one can deny, that we have given him full justification for de- scribing his lineage as “a flood of Negro, a strain of French, a bit of Dutch but, thank God! no ‘Anglo-Saxon.’ ” P. 9. “What then is this dark world thinking? It is thinking that as wild and awful as this shameful war was, it is nothing to com- pare with that fight for freedom which the black and brown and yellow men must and will make unless their oppression and humiliation and insult at the hands of the White World cease. The Dark World is going to submit to its present treatment just as long as it must and not one moment longer.” P. 49. Is it not significant that Prof. Du Bois representing the black race and Lothrop Stoddard representing the white race should emerge from the study of this problem both with a sword in hand? Will the White Race Survive? Is this the only alternative? Let us accept Stoddard’s dark view at its worst. The white race is dying compared with the dark races. The white race is no longer able to maintain its place in the lead of the procession because of a decreasing birth rate. The far flung battle line or frontiers of the white man are 12 RACE VALUES AND RACE DESTINIES now being bitterly challenged by the dispossessed colored races, by the Red in South America, the Brown in India, the Yellow in Asia and the Black in Africa and America. The “outer” and “inner dykes” are breaking down and a slow infusion of colored blood is taking place into the whites and the blacks are slowly bleaching out. Ten million white soldiers with a rich inheritance lie in The Great War’s grave whereon the white race committed suicide — and perhaps twenty million other whites died by disease, starvation and deprivation. One more war like the last and the white race will be ordered to the rear. No artificial means, no laws, no sword ever bolstered up a race which turned its back on duty and resolutely turned its r ace toward dilletanteism, pleasure and ease. No law has ever yet been discovered which can prevent the races who are willing to work, and willing to breed their kind from dispossessing the races decimated by sloth, pleas- ure and race suicide. Suppose the white race as now constituted is to be “one with Ninevah and Tyre”? Supposing with all our culture we are to give place as did those who wrote the libraries of Alexandria, or filled the archives of Nippur with ten thousand volumes, or the Greeks who have put all intellectual ages in debt or the Roman with his power for justice, laws and civilization? Such a day of judgment was never postponed in history by shrug- ging the shoulders, by oppression, by race prejudice and race pride or by the unsheathed sword. History has but one verdict on such a program — “They that take the sword shall perish by the sword.” Every drop of blood shed by the sword — the sword of steel or the sword of oppressive laws — hastens the day of destruction of its wielder. May be the white man is to be slowly snuffed out between the thumb and forefinger of color — there is a strange law of evolution which warns us that the “best” are not always the “fittest to survive.” Races have been strong and great, have builded and written, invented and created and have passed on while races then forgotten and despised came into the inheritance of their race values. One can almost see the sneer on the face of Caesar and his legions had they been told that those barbarous, gluttonous, blood-drinking peoples, whom they found in Britain’s Island, should some day establish laws for a vaster realm than Rome and possess a culture finer and more humanita- rian. And it could not have been if Rome had continued to de- spise and oppress and shut them out from participation in their RACE VALUES AND RACE DESTINIES 13 finer life. But out from Rome went those men of truer vision who transferred to Britain the best Of Rome’s inheritance. To transfer to the barbarians of northern Europe the cream of Rome’s culture and faith, was a vastly greater thing for the un- born generations than standing with dripping sword to turn back the swelling tides of Teutonic tribes. In the evolutionary process the disappearance of a race seems to be of little moment. “The Moving Finger writes, and having writ moves on” but the losing of the finer values and achievements of that race, the neglect of that race to transfer those values to those who shall come on, this is the only defeat which the evolutionary process knows. In spite of our pride and conceit, it may be barely possi- ble that the survival of the white race is not a sine qua non for future progress. It may be that the darker races are now on the threshold with their hand on the latch string to enter. The Better Way Out No race lives its truest life in living for its racial today, but which lives a projected life for tomorrow. The white will serve the unborn most truly if we shall unstintedly and ungrudgingly pass on to these darker races the finest achievements of our culture and faith. This at least is the only program for a Christian, for of races it may be said as it was said of the individual, “He that saveth his life shall lose it but he that loset’n his life for my sake and the Gospel’s shall save it.” The American Board with its missions and its Doshisha colleges has done more to insure the world against the ravages of the Yellow Peril and of Japanese Prussian Militarism than the broken swords of Russia and Germany. The American Missionary Association with fifty years of service among the Orientals in California, transforming and equipping hundreds of Oriental youths with Christian Democracy and faith, has done more to insure the peace of tomorrow, to keep the world fit for the unborn than all the swords brandished by a Hearst or a legislature. Whether the yellow man is to dominate America or not is very doubtful but that he is to dominate Asia is certain and the attitude of America toward the yellow man for the next twenty-five years will determine whether Asia is to be Pagan or Christian. The giving to the yellow man Christian faith and Christian education and thus fit him to make Asia a decent place 14 RACE VALUES AND RACE DESTINIES for the children of tomorrow may mesh into the scheme of divine Providence more closely than the maintenance of the white man’s superiority. The Human Right to a Future And so with our still darker brother, the Negro. That the Negro will ever displace the white man in America is exceedingly doubtful, but that he will remain here, will have a part in the making or unmaking of our civilization, and that that will be an increasingly large part, there can be no possible doubt. To stand with sword in hand to defend the white man’s domains or rights, to bar every approach to the best and all the best things which the white man has achieved, to deny him the commonest rights vouchsafed by the Magna Charta and the Constitution has not availed us anything but only to exaggerate the problem, and bring strife, hatred and bloodshed and prevent him from living a one hundred percent man among his own race. The historic soul of the American Missionary Association has been — (a soul which we have maintained against all comers, in the face of hatreds and misunderstandings, in spite of calumnies and perse- cutions) — is that a superior race vindicates its faith in its supe- riority not by fearing another race, or by keeping that race sub- merged and “in its place” but by opening to that race the door to every human right and every privilege which will enable that race to live its own life in the completest way. For that reason we have not planned for him an education which would keep him inferior or which would enable him to keep on serving a superior race. We believe in the Hampton Idea and the Tuskegee Idea with all our hearts but we believe also in the Fisk Idea, the Howard Idea, the Talladega Idea, the Straight Idea — in other words we believe in the education of the hand, the heart, the head. We believe that if a liberal education is needed for our boys to enable them to live a whole life, it is no less needed for the darker boy and girl that they may occupy the whole human house, hang upon its walls finer and purer pictures, fit every room with better and more pleasureable furnishings, and that he may go from the cellar of service to the upper chambers of in- tellectual life and open the windows to a broader and fairer horizon. This we covet for our own and this we equally covet for him and his. And this he will have. RACE VALUES AND RACE DESTINIES 15 A Race in Revolt He is now in open revolt against the industrial theory that shuts him out from Labor Unions and from labor of technical skill ; he is in open revolt against an education which purposes to keep the Negro in his place — that of hewers of wood and carriers of water, of washer-women and servants, of the white coat and Pullman cap and he will soon no longer hear the beckoning whistle of the white man or his call of “here boy” or ‘‘here George”; and now he is in open revolt against that theory of democracy which opens the ballot booth wide to harlots and procureurs, to thieves and thugs, to the white man who can make only his mark and shuts it in the face of the most cultured and moral whose face is black; and he is in open revolt against that conception or interpretation of our Constitution which with hat in hand throws the door of full American citizenship wide open to the Reds of Russia, to the Mafias of Italy, to the Incendiaries of Ireland, to the illiterates -of the Balkans and declares his own college graduates as unfit and dangerous for citizenship, but the rights of citizenship with the full and free exercise of the ballot and equal rights in the public schools, this man will have if he has to strip the cotton fields of the south of their workers, the homes of their servants and move north by the hundreds of thousands and he will face the northern mob with citizenship rather than face the southern mob without citizenship for to him as to us Liberty is more precious than life. The Challenge of Ignorance And if we divested ourselves of every bit of Christian philan- thropy, we should still go on and we should call upon every Amer- ican to come with us to save this colored race to save ourselves. America is not safe when of a race now numbering nearly twelve million, forty percent of the children between the ages of six and fourteen were not in school a single day for the last year prior to our last census. America is not safe when in the regions where most of them live, few schools beyond the ninth grade are provided for them. When this race holds the balance of political power in the great city of Chicago, it is of supreme moment to us that in the 15 States from which these Negroes are mostly recruited, the salaries paid for teachers show $10.32 paid per white pupil and $2.85 paid per colored pupil. America is not safe when in Mont- 16 RACE VALUES AND RACE DESTINIES gomery, Alabama, the teacher’s salaries for the white pupil aver- age $20.94 and for the colored pupil $3.67, and yet the illiteracy among the white was 1.1 percent and among the colored was 25.1 per ceet. Georgia spent last year or the year before S772,943 for the higher education of the whites and $10,000 for the higher education of the colored — the colored forming close to one-half the population. These men either North or South will have the ballot— Democracy dies in the hands of the ignorant voter. The Diviner Harmony And if we are wise we will do this not because the colored man needs us but because we need him. No race is complete in itself, no race liveth unto itself. Each plays its part in the great orchestra of the world. The violinist may believe that he alone is needed to make complete harmony, but the great conductor listens not alone for his fine stringed note, but for the cornet, the flute, the base viol, the drum and the cymbals. And He who shapes that “far off divine event toward which the whole creation moves,” out of all this discord and jangling will perfect his own praise and He who shapes the eternal harmonies knows that for the perfect whole each race is essential.