CHAPTER 66

BIOLOGICAL CHANCES OF SURVIVAL

Absence of a Solution of the Negro Problem in Social Science-Relinquishment of the Problem to the Biological Principle of the Survival of the FittestProbability of the Survival of the Negro from the Standpoint of History and Vital Statistics

TH

HERE seems to be no solution of the Negro problem from the standpoint of social science. Neither anthropology nor sociology, nor political science, has yet announced any tenet upon which a solution might be proposed. Certainly history offers no instance of the harmonious commingling of a white and a black race in the same territory, and none of the proposed solutions so far attempted, or advocated in the United States, offers any prospect of proving workable. The Negro problem, like that of mixing oil and water, is insoluble, and the authorities most competent to speak on the subject generally confess it to be a problem for which there is no solution. "To-day, more than ever," says Hoffman, "the colored race forms a distinct element, and presents more than at any time in the past the most complicated and seemingly hopeless problem among those confronting the American people." Henry Nevinson, who has studied the Negro in the United States and in Africa, is of the opinion that, "The whole problem is still before us as urgent and uncertain as it has ever been. It is not solved. What seemeth a solution is already obsolete. The problem will have to be worked through again from the start." 2

1

When, however, human prevision fails to find a solution to a race problem it has to work itself out blindly through the operation of the laws of biology. In case of competition of two species, the fitter survives and the less fit perishes. Have we such a situation in the presence of the Negro and Caucasian in the United States? Is it possible for both to survive under condition of competition?

Some light on the probability of the survival of the Negro in America may be gained by an inquiry into the effect of contact of the Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, p. 1. 'Harpers Monthly, Vol. 111, p. 348.

Negro and the Caucasian in other parts of the world. History furnishes us with several instances of a competitive struggle between these two races, and between the Negro and the yellow and brown races. The French ethnologist Quatrefages states that the Negro type originated in southern Asia, and was the sole occupant of that region for an indefinite period. Then it migrated eastward, giving rise to the black populations of Melanesia, and westward, giving rise to the black populations of Africa. The earliest type of Negro, says Quatrefages, was a pygmy which was partly exterminated and partly driven into the most mountainous and inhospitable districts by the development of a taller and more vigorous Negro type. The taller type supplanted the pygmies, and spread over a vast territory in southern Asia, Melanesia, and Africa. In all of these regions, however, it has been gradually giving way to the advances of the yellow and white races.

3

The English ethnologist, Keane, agrees with Quatrefages that the Negro race once occupied vast domains in Asia, Oceania, and Africa, but has been steadily losing ground as a result of yellow and white immigration. A branch of the Negro race which at one time spread over a large part of India has entirely disappeared as a result of the encroachments of the white race, leaving, as evidence of its existence there, only the present dark-brown Dravidians, who represent an early mixture of the Negro and Aryan. In Africa, within the historic period, the Negro in the North has been yielding territory to the more aggressive Semites, Libyans, and Berbers; and in the South and West, to the races of Europe.

The Bushmen who constituted a large aboriginal element in South Africa, have been gradually driven into the Kalahari desert by the Bantu, and there they have suffered further depletion from the Dutch, who shot them down as wild beasts. The Hottentots, a pygmy race akin to the Bushmen, who at one time, as pastoral nomads, roamed over the whole of Cape Colony, have almost become extinct as a result of their contact with the Dutch and the English. Only a small remnant of them now survives north of the Orange River. The more hardy Kafirs, who once occupied large sections of eastern and northern Cape Colony, have been partly driven north into the forests, and partly utilized as a serving class for the Dutch and English. But both those. that have been driven out and those remaining as servants have suffered

Keane, Ethnology, Ch. XI.

Quatrefages, The Pygmies, p. 52; Keane, Ethnology, p. 254. "Keane, Ethnology, p. 248.

a great falling off in numbers as a consequence of contact with white civilization. In West Africa, where the British, French, German, and Portuguese have planted settlements, the native population has tended toward rapid decline.

In the Black Islands, i. e., that long string of islands stretching from New Guinea to Fiji, contact with the Europeans has everywhere resulted in a great diminution in the native Negro population. In the Fiji group the population has dwindled, within fifty years, from about 200,000 to 94,400.

In Brazil and Cuba the declining birth-rate and high death-rate of the Negro population indicate, if not ultimate extinction, a progressive decline in the relative strength of the Negro population. In Santo Domingo and Haiti, the Negro has survived by exterminating the whites and excluding them from citizenship, and in the British West Indies the Negro, under a highly paternal control, survives, but with a diminishing birth-rate and high death-rate which are not reassuring for the future.

It seems that not only the Negro, but other races on a low level of culture have uniformly undergone rapid physical deterioration and decline of population as a result of contact with Caucasian civilization. For instance, note the Tasmanians, extinct since 1850, the aboriginal Australians, the Maoris of New Zealand, the Hawaiians, formerly numbering 500,000, now reduced to less than 50,000, the Indians of Oklahoma, etcetera. This deterioration of the lower cultured races shows itself in a decline in their birth-rate and an increase in their death-rate brought about through inadaptability to the discipline of the white man's institutions."

Let us now turn to mortality statistics, and see what light they throw on the probable survival of the Negro in America.

As soon as the Negroes were emancipated they began to leave the homes of the white people, and to segregate themselves in the towns and in the country where, freed from the oversight of their former masters and mistresses, they lived under conditions which favored the development and spread of a variety of diseases. A rise in their deathrate was, therefore, inevitable.

The first authoritative study of the vital statistics of the Negro was "Australasia," Stanford's Compendium of Geography and Travel, Vol. 2,

p. 485.

'For fuller discussion of the causes of deterioration see Dowd, The Negro Races, Vol. 1, Ch. XXXIX.

made in 1896 by Frederick Hoffman, statistician of the Prudential Life Insurance Company, the object of the study being to ascertain if life insurance could be safely offered to the Negro race. Hoffman found that the mortality of the Negro was two or three times that of the whites, and he attributed the higher mortality of the Negro to his constitutional weakness and his bad traits which led him into vice. He quoted the Union Army records of the Civil War showing that the Negroes enlisted were less infected with diseases than the whites, but that their death-rate from diseases was three times greater than that of the whites.8

Then he pointed out that, following the Civil War, the mortality records of Charleston, 1865-1894, show a death-rate of the Negro from consumption much greater than that of the whites; that statistics of the Freedmen's Bureau, 1865-1872, show a higher death-rate for the Negro from constitutional and respiratory diseases."

An examination of the mortality records of the Negro in all sections of the country prior to 1896 revealed the fact that his death-rate was relatively high and tending to increase.

Hoffman, therefore, came to the conclusion that the high mortality of the Negro, as manifested since the Civil War, was unfavorable to his survival. He believed that everywhere the great cause of the dying out of backward peoples in contact with the Caucasian is unchastity, and that the vices of the Negro in America are the chief cause of his high mortality. "It is not in the conditions of life," he said, "but in the race traits and tendencies that we find the causes of the excessive mortality. So long as these tendencies are persisted in, so long as immorality and vice are the habit of life of the vast majority of the colored population, the effect will be to increase the mortality by hereditary transmission of weak constitutions, and to lower still further the rate of natural increase, until the births fall below the deaths, and gradual extinction results." 10

This gloomy outlook for the Negro seemed to be justified by the data available at the time of Hoffman's investigation.

Since the year of Hoffman's investigation, however, the Negro death-rate has very notably declined. From 1910 to 1921 the rate fell from 24.2 to 18.4. Indeed, the Negro death-rate has shown a greater decline in recent years than the white rate. The decline in the rate for

8

Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, p. 74. "Ibid., p. 80.

10

Ibid., p. 95.