Nell Irvin Painter

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Nell Irvin Painter | Ralph Waldo Emerson's Saxons | The Journal of American History, 95.4 | The History Cooperative

Ralph Waldo Emerson's Saxons

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) towers over the American Renaissance but does not, though he should, reign as philosopher-king of American white-race theory. Widely hailed for his enormous intellectual strength and prodigious output, Emerson wrote the earliest full-length statement of the ideology later termed "Anglo-Saxonist." His "Saxons" are not, most emphatically, the same as white Americans or white people.¹

We ordinarily locate both white masculine gender panic and spread-eagle Anglo-Saxonism at the turn of the twentieth century, but Emerson laid them out half a century earlier, in the 1850s. In an influential treatise and oft-repeated lectures, he portrayed the American as Saxon and the Saxon as manly man and separated the genealogy of the American Saxon from that of the Celt. Deftly and subtly, Emerson elevated the Saxons and disappeared the Celts from the identity of the American. Emerson makes it crystal clear that "Saxon" (or, later, "Anglo-Saxon") is not a synonym for "white," even though the historiographical literature often seems to equate them.

My remarks this evening come from my work in progress, The History of White People, which W. W. Norton will publish in the spring of 2010. The book offers a counterhistory of a prominent theme in Western thought, historicizing the notion of the white, rather than the nonwhite, races.²

Let me state categorically that I do not underestimate or ignore the overwhelming importance of black race in United States history. A truly gigantic literature exists to explain the meaning and importance of race when it means black, to prove that race-as-blackness really and truly does exist (and, more recently, to show that it is no more than a cultural construction). By concentrating on the white races, I do not overlook or downplay the fundamental nature of concepts of black race. After all, the United States as a nation was founded by and largely for the owners of African slaves. Over the course of some two hundred years, federal, state, and local governments labored to define black race, a history we recognize all too well. We know also that concepts of black-race identity have changed over time, in terms of naming and of ostensible biological basis. So far this sophistication has only barely begun to extend across the color line.³

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