Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems: Expanded Edition

RACE QUESTIONS, PROVINCIALISM, AND OTHER AMERICAN PROBLEMS

EXPANDED EDITION

RACE QUESTIONS, PROVINCIALISM, AND OTHER AMERICAN PROBLEMS

EXPANDED EDITION

JOSIAH ROYCE

Edited by

Scott L. Pratt and Shannon Sullivan

Copyright © 2009 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Royce, Josiah, 1855–1916.

    Race questions, provincialism, and other American problems / Josiah

Royce; edited by Scott L. Pratt and Shannon Sullivan.—Expanded ed.

       p. cm.

   Originally published: New York : Macmillan, 1908. Includes six

supplementary essays by Royce.

   Includes bibliographical references and index.

   ISBN 978–0-8232–3132–4 (cloth : alk. paper)

   ISBN 978–0-8232–3133–1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

   1. United States—Civilization. 2. Cultural pluralism—United

States. 3. United States—Ethnic relations. 4. United States—Race

relations. I. Pratt, Scott L. II. Sullivan, Shannon, 1967–III. Title.

E168.R89 2009

973—dc22

                                                                                               2009005485

Printed in the United States of America

11 10 09 5 43 2 1

First edition

Contents

Introduction to Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems

SCOTT L. PRATT

Royce’s Race Questions and Prejudices

SHANNON SULLIVAN

PART ONE

Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems

PART TWO

What Should Be the Attitude of Teachers of Philosophy Towards Religion?

The Problem of Natural Religion: The Present Position

Football and Ideals

Some Characteristic Tendencies of American Civilization

Provincialism. Based upon a Study of Early Conditions in California

An American Thinker on the War

Notes

Index

Editors’ Note

We have left the spelling and punctuation in this volume exactly as Royce had them. We’ve not altered the material except to replace the original page numbers in cross-references with the corresponding page numbers in the Fordham University Press edition of the book.

RACE QUESTIONS, PROVINCIALISM, AND OTHER AMERICAN PROBLEMS

EXPANDED EDITION

INTRODUCTION TO RACE QUESTIONS, PROVINCIALISM, AND OTHER AMERICAN PROBLEMS

Scott L. Pratt

In May 1915, a German submarine sank the passenger liner Lusitania. More than 1,100 passengers and crew died, among them 123 Americans. The respected Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce had remained publicly neutral on the issue of the war in Europe. Yet he responded to the attack on the Lusitania with a public letter of outrage that reasserted the doctrine about life that he named loyalty and that he had earlier applied to situations of social conflict in Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, which he had published in 1908.

Royce had long admired German culture and philosophy and had seen them as a source both of wisdom and of practical social and economic development that could serve as a model for the world. With Germany’s declaration of war in 1914, Royce dutifully preserv[ed] a deliberate reticence in the classroom, a practice consistent

My thanks to Mathew Foust for his comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this essay.

with his understanding of his role as a philosopher. In his 1902 address about philosophers teaching religion, Royce concluded that clearness of thought, and the judicial spirit [in comparison of views], are the philosopher’s peculiar tasks.¹ After the Lusitania was torpedoed and the German government expressed approval of the action, Royce declared that I am no longer neutral, even in form.² The action of destroying the Lusitania and the appeal that Germany now makes to all humanity … [express] utter contempt for everything which makes the common life of humanity tolerable or possible.³ If this appeal were accepted, he continued, whatever makes home or country or family or friends or any form of loyalty worthily dear, is made an object of perfectly deliberate and merciless assault.⁴ His former loyalties were set aside in favor of a larger loyalty to the cause of true peace, even if he must set aside the neutrality demanded by his loyalty to the practice of philosophy.

Royce had introduced the idea of loyalty as the central moral principle in his 1908 volume The Philosophy of Loyalty. Loyalty, the willing and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause,⁵ marks a complex relationship. On one hand, it is the relation of individuals to causes and groups that provide purpose for their activities. Teachers are loyal to the cause of education, doctors to medicine, scientists to science. In each case, an individual’s activities are understood and evaluated in relation to the larger cause of being a teacher, or a doctor, or a scientist. A teacher’s work is not simply an individual activity done for its own sake, but rather something that gets its character and purpose at least in part through a teacher’s commitment to a cause shared by others. [A] cause, Royce held, is something which seems to the loyal person to be larger than his private self, [and] in the second place, unites him with other persons by some social tie.⁶ Such loyalty is not loyalty to oneself. Even when a person’s cause includes herself, as when a person is loyal to her country, the cause is still much larger. Loyalty, in Royce’s sense, means that the person believes her cause would keep its essential value even if her private interests were left out of account.⁷

On the other hand, for a loyal person, the cause does not prescribe exactly what ought to be done in service of the cause one has taken up. People choose causes and give or bring to them things unique to the individual, literally devotions. In this sense, loyalty provides a context for meaning for individuals (in which, for example a teacher is a teacher) and a means by which individuals are made distinct (the devotion of a particular teacher adds something to the cause and in so doing allows the teacher to stand out as an individual). As a result, loyalty marks both a defining relation and an activity that goes beyond the relation given. In this way, causes are sustained and constantly transformed by loyal action. In notes prepared for an ethics course offered near the end of his life, Royce wrote:

Loyalty, if it is anything, is or ought to be in all of us a growing doctrine about life, and a growing method of trying to solve the problems of life. The doctrine of Loyalty does not consist of a collection of formulas which you can memorize verbatim, and apply mechanically to all cases as they come up. … [W]hat one means by loyal conduct can be defined only through a continual effort to readjust the problems of life to an ideal, which, just because it is always living and growing, involves a willingness to reinterpret the situations which arise, to reconsider the solution which we have thus far attempted.⁸

The necessity of choosing a cause or an ideal raises an immediate problem. Does it matter what cause is selected? Is it enough just to be loyal to something? Plainly, he says, a good many different sorts of people and of deeds have been called loyal. And, if you view the matter merely upon the basis of a comparison of a few widely various instances of loyalty, you may be disposed to say that the moral quality in question is too wavering and confused a feature of character to be fitly used as a type of all moral excellence.⁹ Royce, in fact, recognizes that there is some good even in loyalty to bad causes, and so may have considered the German sailors that carried out the attack on the Lusitania to be loyalists—patriots devoted to Germany. In his condemnation of the action, it was not the loyalty of the sailors that was at fault; rather it is the nature of the cause. Given the importance of loyalty to individuals, that is, providing them with a context for self-knowledge and purposive action, the best causes are the ones that recognize the value of loyalty and foster it. This, Royce concludes, is the central ethical principle: loyalty to loyalty. The cause of war, Royce came to believe, is not merely an assault on lives, it is also an assault on the meaning and potential of peoples’ lives. Royce rejected the cause of the aggressors in favor of a loyalty to humanity as a whole for its potential to foster loyalty on an ever wider scale.

It would be easy to conclude that loyalty is, for Royce, a virtue like courage or charity. While Royce claims that loyalty is a certain attitude of mind, it is an attitude that marks a relation that is necessary for every special virtue. I maintain, he says, "that without loyalty there is no thoroughgoing morality; and I also insist that all special virtues and duties, such as those which the names benevolence, truthfulness, justice, spirituality, charity, recall to our minds, are parts or are special forms of loyalty. My theory is that the whole moral law is implicitly bound up in the one precept: Be loyal."¹⁰ Since loyalty marks a willing commitment to something beyond oneself and involving others, it is manifest in each virtue. If one were to try to give up loyalty in favor of another virtue, one would, on Royce’s account, still necessarily be loyal. The virtues of courage and charity are particular ways of being loyal to a cause that also fosters the loyalty of others. Courage marks one’s commitment to a cause despite difficulties so that others may take it up; charity marks one’s commitment to others in order that they may follow the causes they choose. Even as each virtue marks a commitment to a particular cause, it also marks a commitment to furthering the cause of loyalty itself. Further, when one recognizes the logical priority of loyalty, one can choose to take it as a cause directly: loyalty to loyalty. This logically prior principle then can serve as the standard in terms of which particular loyalties can be judged. There is no duty, he says in The Sources of Religious Insight, there is no virtue whose warrant and whose value you cannot deduce from this one principle.¹¹ In Race Questions, Royce concludes, regard your neighbor’s loyalty as something sacred. Do nothing to make him less loyal. Never despise him for his loyalty, however little you care for the cause he chooses.¹² In the sinking of the Lusitania and its aftermath, Royce saw the cause of German nationalism reject loyalty to loyalty and so show itself as evil. Loyalty to loyalty, even as it includes diverse causes, must at times reject the ones that undermine the possibility of furthering loyalty.¹³

When Royce introduced the philosophy of loyalty in 1908, the importance of a willing devotion to a cause had already been part of his thinking at least since his 1886 history of California. Writing of the claim that, in general, the California mining camps were well ordered, he argued that this good order, widely spread as it often was, was still in its nature unstable, since it had not been won as a prize of social devotion, but only attained by a sudden feat of instinctive cleverness. The social order is, however, something that instinct must make in its essential elements, by a sort of first intention, but that only voluntary devotion can secure against corruption.¹⁴ A few years later, one of Royce’s students at Radcliffe College, Ella Lyman Cabot, wrote in her notebook: Royce’s ethical motto: ‘Act so as to make more ties and stronger ones … that is be loyal and loyalty includes sympathy and order.’ ¹⁵ By 1908, Royce concluded that loyalty is the practical aspect and expression of an idealistic philosophy.¹⁶ The causes to which one is loyal provide the ideals that guide action. To the extent that one recognizes the centrality of loyalty, one can become loyal to the greatest cause, the ideal of loyalty itself. If, then, we look over the field of human life to see where good and evil have most clustered, we see that the best in human life is its loyalty; while the worst is whatever has tended to make loyalty impossible, or to destroy it when present, or to rob it of its own while it still survives.¹⁷

Causes, in the end, came to be identified with communities by Royce. In his 1912 The Sources of Religious Insight and his 1913 The Problem of Christianity, loyalty is transformed from a commitment to a cause to "the practically devoted love of an individual for a community."¹⁸ The transformation is significant and opens a whole new range of philosophical questions where loyalty properly captures the relation and activity of individuals within communities. In The Sources of Religious Insight, he recognizes that it is not enough for individuals to act with respect to a passive cause. Rather, causes themselves, as communities, have the character of still larger selves, which also must act: the community is a being that attempts to accomplish something in time through the deeds of its members.¹⁹ One form of action draws the community together and another places the community in relation to other communities. The former Royce calls grace. For those who become devoted to a cause, Royce writes, A peculiar grace has been indeed granted to them—a free gift, but one which they can only accept by being ready to earn it—a precious treasure that they cannot possess without loving and serving the life that has thus endowed them. … This grace, this gift, is what may be called their Cause.²⁰ The other form of action, loyal action, is the way in which the community, through its members, acts in relation to other communities and to its own past and future. On this view, loyalty is part of a reciprocal process in which one both chooses a cause and is chosen by it.

In 1914, Royce returned to his formulation of loyalty in a series of lectures given at the University of California at Berkeley. Here he summarizes three principles of loyalty. First, the communities to which individuals are loyal may be, and under certain conditions are, genuine selves, living beings whose reality is of a higher type than is your individual reality or mine.²¹ The second principle connects the meaning of the life of the individual to her or his community. Royce calls this process of meaning-making salvation. [T]he salvation of every individual man depends upon his voluntary devotion to some such living and lovable community.²² Finally, we all, precisely in so far as we are loyal, come into some genuine touch with one and the same reality, with one and the same cause, with one and the same live spiritual reality.²³ In the act of being loyal, each person (individual or community) becomes united in a larger whole, that is, each person becomes part of the community of those loyal to loyalty. At the same time, acts of loyalty distinguish each person from the whole. The result is at once unification and, by the actions of loyalty, individualization.

Royce was born in 1855 in a California mining camp that later became the town of Grass Valley. The connection between him and his home community remained central to his work throughout his career, and the questions raised by this relationship were formative. Speaking of his philosophical development as beginning in his childhood in California, he explained in his 1915 autobiographical remarks, When I review this whole process, I strongly feel that my deepest motives and problems have centered on the idea of community.²⁴ Royce attended the University of California and graduated in 1875. That same year, he traveled to Germany to study philosophy. In 1876, he returned to the United States to begin study at Johns Hopkins, the new graduate studies university in Baltimore, and in 1878 became one of the first four students to receive a doctorate from the university. He returned to California to teach but in 1882 was called to Harvard University to serve as a replacement for William James while James was away on a sabbatical. Royce was eventually invited to stay at Harvard and remained there, with frequent trips back to California, until his death on September 14, 1916, at his home near the Harvard campus.

Royce’s move to Harvard marked both a crucial break with his past in California and a starting point for his work. Even as he developed his conception of loyalty and community, he struggled to make sense of the ever larger context in which loyalty would be realized. The result, in 1899 and 1900, was his series of Gifford Lectures delivered in Scotland and published as The World and the Individual. While these lectures addressed a conception of the Whole (the Absolute), Royce was not satisfied that he had successfully shown how his insights about the universe applied to lived human experience. In a lecture series given in 1907, he attempted to make the connections clear between the Whole and its parts by considering the relationship between individuals and communities in the context of finite human life. The initial positive reception of these lectures, published in March 1908 as The Philosophy of Loyalty, led to the publication later that year of Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, five essays that sought to apply the philosophy of loyalty to specific problems faced by Americans in the first decade of the twentieth century. These problems included racial differences and conflict, the development of distinct regions and regional characters in the United States, the limits of public debate, the role of the environment in fostering communities, and the place of physical training in relation to well-being. In each case, the philosophy of loyalty plays a key role both in understanding the problem and in framing a response. The challenge for readers, then as now, was how to understand this general doctrine of life.

The essay Race Questions and Prejudices is, as Shannon Sullivan’s introduction (following) suggests, a unique contribution by an American academic philosopher of the early twentieth century. While most philosophers skirted the issue, Royce used the issue of race to title his volume. The essay, given first as an address to the Chicago Ethical Society, surveys the conception of race and ongoing race conflicts in the United States and elsewhere. The essay raises significant questions about the ways in which race is understood and how race prejudice can be addressed. At its center, Royce presents two examples of good responses to race conflict, one from Jamaica and one from Trinidad. In each case, Royce holds that the key to fostering tolerance and peace is the development of a sound administrative and legal system that includes full participation by non-whites. In response to this conclusion, he imagines a complaint from a person in the U.S. South, that the race-problem is such as constantly to endanger the safety of his home and if African Americans were to become full participants in the legal system, they would bring even more danger to Southern whites. Royce’s response seems unsatisfactory: The problem that endangers the sanctity of your homes and that is said sometimes to make lynching a necessity, is not a race-problem. It is an administrative problem.²⁵ It would be easy to dismiss Royce’s answer here on grounds that his diagnosis ignores the real problem of racism, but this is in fact the place in which the philosophy of loyalty emerges most clearly. For Royce, loyalty to loyalty is a commitment to one’s causes in a way that fosters the loyalty of others. This further relation, the fostering of others’ loyalty, is not the product of indifferent accident or of forced practices, but rather is part of an ongoing negotiation among the groups seeking to realize their own futures. Administrative relations provide a formal context in which the boundaries of communities can intersect, come into conflict, and promote ways of resolving conflicts that preserve and foster others’ loyalty. This solution, for Royce, is an old one and emerges in his own work in his discussions of California. The answer to the disorders of the mining camps was the establishment of a sound administrative structure to mediate conflicts when they emerged and help foster the development of communities—causes—with a sense of their history, of their present place, and of hope for the future. In the end, Royce seems to offer a conception of racial coexistence not unlike that offered by his former student W. E. B. Du Bois in Souls of Black Folk.²⁶

The essay Provincialism²⁷ likewise takes up the philosophy of loyalty, here emphasizing three problems that can interfere with the development of that form of loyalty Royce calls wise provincialism.²⁸ To be a loyal member of a community is to be committed to fostering the growth of one’s local community in a way that promotes the growth of other communities as well. He summarizes his appeal on behalf of wise provincialism this way: I hope and believe that you all intend to have your community live its own life, and not the life of any other community, nor yet the life of a mere abstraction called humanity in general.²⁹ This effort, however, faces three challenges: unassimilated newcomers, a leveling tendency, and the mob spirit.

The first problem is faced when newcomers enter a community but refuse to become a part of it. The result is internal conflict and a loss of a sense of shared commitment. Even though newcomers themselves are often a boon and welcome indeed, their failure to become part of the community, Royce claims, is a source of social danger that threatens to undermine the community and block the potential of individuals to grow in their service to the community.³⁰ The second is a product of the ease of communication amongst distant places, … the spread of popular education, and … the consolidation and … the centralization of industries and of social authorities [that lead us to] submit to the same overmastering social forces, to live in the same external fashions, to discourage individuality, and to approach a dead level of harassed mediocrity.³¹ Like concerns about globalization in the present world, the challenge to provincialism, and so to loyalty, is that economic and cultural connections can overwhelm differences among communities and put emergent individuality at risk as well. The third problem is related: the rule of the mob.³² As in the case of the leveling tendency, individuals lose their sense of distinctiveness, but in this case, Royce observes, like a hypnotized subject, the member of the excited mob may feel as if he were very independently expressing himself … when as a fact the ruling idea is suggested by the leaders of the mob or even by the accident of the momentary situation.³³ Here again, both community and individuality are lost. The solution, again, is to return to the idea of loyalty to loyalty and seek to foster communities that support individual loyalties and the loyalties of other communities as well.

The third essay of the original volume, On Certain Limitations of the Thoughtful Public in America, challenges the American public in terms of the philosophy of loyalty. The great limitation of our thoughtful public in America, Royce proposes, remains its inability to take sufficient control of affairs.³⁴ In many ways, this essay is a direct response to the Social Gospel and mutualist movements of the time.³⁵ These movements are framed by a broad commitment to social betterment, but at the beginning of the twentieth century, the betterment achieved was very limited. The prophets true and false, he observed, speak their many words. Many listen and applaud. Yet at the elections the prophets do not win. The thoughtful public remains the most characteristic, but too often the least effective, portion of the community.³⁶ With those in the Social Gospel movement, Royce argued that reform must come from within. The kingdom of heaven is within you; and that truth is precisely what all ideally minded people know.³⁷ Here, loyalty marks both the value of the ideals to which Americans appear committed, and the necessity of the work of individuals to bring about reform. The work of one man, in this life, has a narrow range. Yet, on the other hand, the forest is made of trees; and great reforms are due to the combined action of numerous individuals.³⁸ The difficulty faced by such demands is that individuals are not able to address all of the problems or state all of the ideals required to bring about a reform of society in which people can flourish. To put it another way, even as one is loyal to a society as a whole, the limitations of individuals require that each person take up only part of the whole and make a limited, specialized contribution.

At first Royce’s solution sounds like a call for experts of the sort that Walter Lippmann would make a few years later.³⁹ In brief, Royce concludes, I say to our thoughtful public, overcome your limitations, first by minute and faithful study of a few things and by clearness of ideas about them; then by childlike simplicity in the rest of life, by faithfulness to enlightened leaders, and above all by work.⁴⁰ However, instead of arguing in favor of an expert class to serve as leaders as Lippmann would, Royce’s model calls for the widest possible participation in social development that, on one hand, relies on loyalty and, on the other, recognizes human limits. The result is a division of labor in the process of social reform in which individuals, through their larger loyalty, commit to the ideals of a society that warrants their trust in others, even so-called enlightened leaders. At the same time, each individual’s own work brings a distinctive and potentially creative component to the work of reform as a whole. From this angle, one can see how a loyal public is essential to the emergence of a province through a common commitment and to the ability to address problems such as racism through the development of a wider structure in terms of which race prejudice can be identified and undermined.

The essay on the Pacific Coast focuses on the development of loyalty and its social character as provincialism in the context of the environmental constraints and affordances of northern California.⁴¹ From one angle it seems that Royce tries to credit the climate and geography of California with producing a distinctive form of idealistic philosophy. The attributions, however, are not instances of the genetic fallacy, but instead mark a recognition that, like any community that responds to its place and history, a geographical region develops a distinctive sense of its own purpose and future. It is not that California generates idealism and other places do not, but that, like other places, California has developed its own distinctive provincial character, aided by its isolation from the eastern United States and its place at the intersection of Spanish-speaking peoples, immigrants from Asia and Europe, and emigrants from the East Coast.⁴² The result is again the development of individuals who generate new ideas and possibilities and a broader commitment to the community as a whole, framed by a government that reflects at once the conservation of the past and the demand for innovation to realize a common future.

The final essay in the original collection, on physical training, is probably the last written and the essay in the volume most directly tied to the philosophy of loyalty as it stood in 1908. Originally an address to the Boston Physical Education Society, Royce argued that physical training could directly support the effort to teach loyalty to youth.⁴³ Here again, there is a strong connection to the social reform movements of the day (he makes direct reference to the Young Men’s Christian Association, for example).

Part of the effort to transform urban communities into environments that fostered growth and citizenship included athletic training. Jane Addams argued for such training as part of the Social Settlement movement in The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets,⁴⁴ and organizations such as the YMCA and the Boy Scouts had physical training as an important part of their work with youth. Royce affirmed these efforts by suggesting that physical training could make four contributions to the general effort to foster loyalty. First, Royce observes that devotion to a cause is more than an abstract decision; it is a motor process as well and requires that one must be in control of one’s powers, or one has no self to give to one’s cause. Physical training provides the skills needed to control one’s activities so that they can be directed in service of a cause. Second, athletic work is loyalty itself … the tasks that imply the devotion of a man’s whole power to an office that takes him out of his private self and into the great world of real social life.⁴⁵ And third, athletic activity fosters a sense of fair play. Like loyalty to loyalty, fair play is a disposition that seeks to make it possible for others to participate fully in the activity. It depends upon essentially respecting one’s opponent just because of his loyalty to his own side … to enjoy, to admire, to applaud, to love, to further that loyalty of his at the very moment when I keenly want and clearly intend to thwart his individual deeds and to win this game, if I can.⁴⁶ Finally, athletic training can also foster moments of learning that Royce calls maximal experiences. These moments are ones in which loyalty is not experienced reflectively but is, in effect, fully lived. Maximal experiences are ones that mark the value of lived loyalty and provide guideposts for fostering still more loyalty in the increasingly complex world beyond the school and gymnasium.

In order to understand better the emergence of loyalty, this new, expanded edition of Race Questions includes six additional essays that help frame the original set of five. The first, What Should Be the Attitude of Teachers of Philosophy Towards Religion? was originally an address to the American Philosophical Association delivered in 1902. At its center, Royce offers