In a recent analysis of contemporary American imperialism, Cornel West traces its roots to the arrested development of democracy in America. The latter, he argues, can only be understood historically; and a – if not the – principal lens under which it must be examined is the pervasiveness of white supremacy in our history. The failure to come fully to terms with the deeply racist and imperialist strains in our national past remains a fundamental weakness of our political culture. Until critical historical consciousness of that past informs political discourse in the present, the “self-deceptive innocence” and avoidance of “painful truths about ourselves” so characteristic of debate in our public sphere will persist. West stresses the profound interconnections between race and empire in our nation's history. He highlights the constitutive tensions between freedom and domination, inclusion and exclusion, national independence and imperial expansion in that history, and the racist worldview that informed them. In this chapter I want to take up one strand of the critical history of the present he calls for: the ascendancy of social Darwinist thinking about race and empire in the period from the end of Reconstruction to the start of World War I.

In the wake of Darwin's Origin of the Species (1859), and through the intermediation of Herbert Spencer and his American disciples, social Darwinism became the dominant ideology in a period that saw the establishment of a racial caste system in the South, the completion of Indian removal in the West, the shift from continental expansion to international imperialism in the war with Spain, and the rise of organized opposition to immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe in the Northeast, and from Asia, especially China, in the West.