Gary Romeo wrote:
[snip]
-----But then how do you explain REH's response to things like the following--
I think this shows that besides his conversations with
Novalyne, Howard should have been aware of non-racist
views that were held by whites. That he chose to
express racist views and include them in some of this
stories shows where his head was at.
1. The 1917 creation by Woodrow Wilson of the Committe on Public Information which distributed pamphlets nation wide explain on the contirbution of the whites to America's heritage while actively downplaying the role of African-Americans, Huns, and East Europeans.
2. The creation of the Bureau of Investigation (no, not the FBI yet, but its forerunner) and the work of the young J. Edgar Hoover against Marcus Garvey and other civil rights leaders.
3. The resurrgence of the KKK and the formation of the Native Sons of the Golden West in th eyears following WW1.
4. The debates which raged in the US Congress from 1921 through 1924 over the various natures and elements of the "races" (which we would now call ethnic groups). Read some of those speeches if you wanna see racism. Some of the more notable ones are by Congressmen Purnell, McSwain, Taylor, and Watkins. Okay, sure none are Texan senators, but I challenge you to prove these debates were never mentioned in the newspapers.
5. The scientific and not-so scientific debates concerning eugenics that occurred in Britain and the USA. One can also add the debates between Boas (and his students) to those of Hooton (and his students at Harvard). While you can question, and rightly so, how much of this reached the general public, Prof. Walter Goldschmidt a student of Kroeber's in the 1920s has remarke din a recent memoir that the stuff was all over the more popular literature (see AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST V. 102 (2001) p. 789-807.
6. The passing of laws by several state legislatures on upholding the ban on mixed-race marriages that occurred in the 1920s.
7. The fact that laws existed on the books of most Southwestern states that didn't permit Hispanics/Mexicans/Mexican-Americans to own land. Many of the laws were not struck off the books until after 1935.
8. The idea of Volksgeist.
So, while you offer one case, I offer many. You really need to take into account the overall currents of society IMO. You can't pick and choose social events if you are going to have a solid historical method.
All the best,
MEH
